Engineering Biomaterial–Drug Conjugates for Local and Sustained Chemotherapeutic Delivery

Abstract

The standard of care for cancer patients includes surgical resection, radiation and chemotherapy with cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs usually part of the treatment. However, these drugs are commonly associated with cardiotoxicity, ototoxicity, nephrotoxicity, peripheral neuropathy and myelosuppression. Strategies to deliver cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs while reducing secondary toxicity and increasing tumor dosing would therefore be desirable. This goal can be achieved through the use of controlled release, drug carrier systems. The aim of this review is to provide an overview of clinically used drug carrier systems and recently developed approaches for drug-biomaterial conjugation.

pH/Reduction Dual‐Triggered Degradable Poly(doxorubicin) Prodrug Nanoparticles for Leakage‐Free Tumor‐Specific Self‐Delivery

“…Stimuli‐responsive drug delivery systems (DDSs) have been widely investigated in the last decades for the aim of on‐demand site‐specific release of anti‐tumor chemotherapeutics, triggered by the intracellular signals and the tumor microenvironment or the external stimuli, by which the premature leakage during the blood circulation could be reduced to a certain extent. Especially for the macromolecular prodrugs with chemotherapeutics covalently conjugated onto the side groups of the polymers via acid‐labile or reduction‐cleavable linkages, the drug leakage could be efficiently minimized than those DDSs with drugs loaded via non‐covalent interactions . However, low drug content is resulted from the limited amount of such conjugating sites …”

Engineering Biomaterials for Enhanced Tissue Regeneration

“…However, covalent/ionic bonds and encapsulation alone often lead to an initial burst release of soluble factors. Many approaches aimed at accomplishing sustained release and zero-order release have been proposed to address the burst issue (for reviews see: [46,47]). For example, in one system [48], bone morphogenetic protein 2 was encapsulated in a nano-sphere which was encapsulated in a micro-sphere scaffolding system to enhance bone regeneration.…”

Drug Delivery Systems Based on Hydroxyethyl Starch

“…Research activity on the development of similar systems is continuing with a fast pace as it is clearly demonstrated by several excellent reviews and perspectives [48][49][50][51][52][53] dealing with drug delivery systems which are analogous to the present review. …”