Nanotechnology in Cancer Drug Delivery and Selective Targeting

Abstract

Nanoparticles are rapidly being developed and trialed to overcome several limitations of traditional drug delivery systems and are coming up as a distinct therapeutics for cancer treatment. Conventional chemotherapeutics possess some serious side effects including damage of the immune system and other organs with rapidly proliferating cells due to nonspecific targeting, lack of solubility, and inability to enter the core of the tumors resulting in impaired treatment with reduced dose and with low survival rate. Nanotechnology has provided the opportunity to get direct access of the cancerous cells selectively with increased drug localization and cellular uptake. Nanoparticles can be programmed for recognizing the cancerous cells and giving selective and accurate drug delivery avoiding interaction with the healthy cells. This review focuses on cell recognizing ability of nanoparticles by various strategies having unique identifying properties that distinguish them from previous anticancer therapies. It also discusses specific drug delivery by nanoparticles inside the cells illustrating many successful researches and how nanoparticles remove the side effects of conventional therapies with tailored cancer treatment.

Liposome and Their Applications in Cancer Therapy

“…While the drug that interacts with lipid bilayer, such as lipophilic compound, normally have better encapsulation rate. Therefore, several strategies have been developed to improve the encapsulation efficiency by linking lipophilic chain to drug molecule to increase its lipophilicity and better partition into the lipid bilayer (Sutradhar and Lutful 2014;Bozzuto and Molinari 2015). Choice of lipid composition is also critical for better loading efficiently by this method.…”

“…Nanocarriers also improve the solubility, bioavailability and pharmacokinetics properties of chemotherapeutics (Gregoriadis and Florence 1993;Bozzuto and Molinari 2015;Pattni et al 2015). Currently, a variety of nanocarriers such as liposomes, polymeric nanoparticles, micelles, nanotubes, etc are already in the market, or under research and evaluation for cancer treatment (Sutradhar and Lutful 2014). This review summarizes the types of methods used for the preparation of liposomes, mechanism of drug loading and potential therapeutic applications in cancer therapy and provides current information on the liposomal products, which are either in clinical use, or clinical trials.…”

Nano based drug delivery

“…However, sometimes dendrimers or polymers are not soluble. In that case, solid state NMR should be used [141][142][143][144].…”

Liposomal Nanoformulations as Current Tumor-Targeting Approach to Cancer Therapy

“…Most currently used anticancer agents are not able to differentiate between cancerous cells and normal ones, resulting in high systemic toxicity and side effects [2]. Because of the severity of the side effects, often dose reduction or cessation of the treatment is necessary, rendering chemotherapy inefficient [3]. By limiting the administered dose to reduce excessive toxicity, only a small fraction of the drug will reach the target tumor site, whereas the remaining portion of the drug will be distributed to other tissues in the body.…”

“…This way, the therapeutic efficiency of chemotherapy is increased, while the toxicity and side effects are reduced [4]. Also, due to their small size, the circulation time of standard chemotherapeutic agents is often short as they are rapidly eliminated from the bloodstream by macrophages, thus reducing the effective drug concentration at the tumor site [3]. Moreover, the majority of current chemotherapeutic agents have poor water solubility and absorption, which result in low bioavailability [2].…”