Stimuli-Responsive Drug Delivery Systems for the Diagnosis and Therapy of Lung Cancer

Abstract

Lung cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Numerous drugs have been developed to treat lung cancer patients in recent years, whereas most of these drugs have undesirable adverse effects due to nonspecific distribution in the body. To address this problem, stimuli-responsive drug delivery systems are imparted with unique characteristics and specifically deliver loaded drugs at lung cancer tissues on the basis of internal tumor microenvironment or external stimuli. This review summarized recent studies focusing on the smart carriers that could respond to light, ultrasound, pH, or enzyme, and provided a promising strategy for lung cancer therapy.

Exosomes and ultrasound: The future of theranostic applications

“…Despite tremendous development in the drug delivery systems-based research, clinical safety was always a concern and hence drug delivery aided by an external force was sorted to avoid administration of any chemical-based drug delivery system. Use of ultrasound instrumentation is one among the successful methodologies that has shown significant success in site targeted delivery of therapeutic drugs developed for cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, endocrine disorders, infectious diseases etc [ 252 , 253 ].…”

Ultrasound-Induced Drug Release from Stimuli-Responsive Hydrogels

“…Ultrasound has successfully been used as a minimally invasive diagnostic tool for the detection and follow-up of cancer patients [ 26 , 107 , 121 ] and for analyte detection [ 122 , 123 , 124 , 125 ]. Ultrasound has also been used for cancer treatment due to its effective real-time capabilities in imaging and has more recently been used for drug delivery from responsive hydrogel systems [ 126 , 127 , 128 , 129 , 130 , 131 ]. Like the hydrogel systems used for drug delivery in tissue engineering, these hydrogels were chosen due to their high loading efficiencies, stability, and flexibility [ 17 ].…”

Stimuli‐accelerated polymeric drug delivery systems

“…In the last few years the development of stimuli‐responsive DDS has attracted increasing interest and a multitude of studies and reviews have been published dealing with this topic 28–30 . Numerous reviews discuss stimuli‐responsive DDS under the aspect of a specific medical indication 31–34 . In contrast, in the present review, from the chemical point of view some emphasis is placed on the synthesis of the respective polymers used for the preparation of DDS and on their stimuli‐dependent disintegration behavior.…”

“…[28][29][30] Numerous reviews discuss stimuli-responsive DDS under the aspect of a specific medical indication. [31][32][33][34] In contrast, in the present review, from the chemical point of view some emphasis is placed on the synthesis of the respective polymers used for the preparation of DDS and on their stimuli-dependent disintegration behavior.…”