Inflammation and Cancer: In Medio Stat Nano

Abstract

Cancer treatment still remains a challenge due to the several limitations of currently used chemotherapeutics, such as their poor pharmacokinetics, unfavorable chemical properties, as well as inability to discriminate between healthy and diseased tissue. Nanotechnology offered potent tools to overcome these limitations. Drug encapsulation within a delivery system permitted i) to protect the payload from enzymatic degradation/inactivation in the blood stream, ii) to improve the physicochemical properties of poorly water-soluble drugs, like paclitaxel, and iii) to selectively deliver chemotherapeutics to the cancer lesions, thus reducing the off-target toxicity, and promoting the intracellular internalization. To accomplish this purpose, several strategies have been developed, based on biological and physical changes happening locally and systemically as consequence of tumorigenesis. Here, we will discuss the role of inflammation in the different steps of tumor development and the strategies based on the use of nanoparticles that exploit the inflammatory pathways in order to selectively target the tumor-associated microenvironment for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes.

Exosome-like Nanovectors for Drug Delivery in Cancer

“…These cell-derived nanovesicles are made up of a lipid bilayer enriched with membrane-associated proteins derived from cells of interest. They are produced mainly by using common protocols developed for liposomes synthesis (Figure 3A) [10], thus allowing drug loading which is not readily achievable in naturally purified exosomes. Moreover, synthetic exosome-like nanocarriers offer excellent versatility for surface modifications with entire cell membrane patches or with only a few selected membrane proteins crucial for specific function and/or a targeting effect [22,77,78].…”

“…Moreover, synthetic exosome-like nanocarriers offer excellent versatility for surface modifications with entire cell membrane patches or with only a few selected membrane proteins crucial for specific function and/or a targeting effect [22,77,78]. Using the thin layer evaporation method commonly used for liposome synthesis, our group developed a protocol for the fabrication of biomimetic exosome-like vesicles for targeting inflamed tissues [10]. These immune cell-derived nanovesicles, called leukosomes, demonstrated a natural targeting ability of immune cells toward inflamed tissues by preserving the topology of plasma membrane proteins.…”

“…Accordingly, recent investigations have demonstrated the use of nanoparticles (NPs) as a promising platform for the delivery of therapeutic agents. NPs provide better therapeutic efficacy through the improvement of loading and release parameters [5,6], biocompatibility and drug circulation-time [7,8,9] and, finally, the controlled and targeted delivery of drugs to target sites [10–14]. In this manner, NPs significantly decrease adverse health effects and simultaneously increase tumor selectivity [15].…”

Advanced nanomedicines for the treatment of inflammatory diseases

“…We have excluded in this review nanomedicines dedicated to cancer therapy where inflammatory processes occurs, because there are already excellent reviews on this subject [35][36][37]. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there is no recent review making the state of the art on the use of nanomedicines when inflammation in general becomes detrimental.…”

Trends towards Biomimicry in Theranostics

“…Recently, bio-inspired approaches have gained increasing popularity in overcoming the current limitations of drug delivery systems such as biocompatibility, toxicity, and targeting [ 89 , 90 ]. FDA-approved Abraxane, albumin-bound paclitaxel, represents the first example of a bio-inspired approach and has been shown to improve circulation time while reducing unwanted side effects of chemotherapy.…”