The Smart Drug Delivery System and Its Clinical Potential

Abstract

With the unprecedented progresses of biomedical nanotechnology during the past few decades, conventional drug delivery systems (DDSs) have been involved into smart DDSs with stimuli-responsive characteristics. Benefiting from the response to specific internal or external triggers, those well-defined nanoplatforms can increase the drug targeting efficacy, in the meantime, reduce side effects/toxicities of payloads, which are key factors for improving patient compliance. In academic field, variety of smart DDSs have been abundantly demonstrated for various intriguing systems, such as stimuli-responsive polymeric nanoparticles, liposomes, metals/metal oxides, and exosomes. However, these nanoplatforms are lack of standardized manufacturing method, toxicity assessment experience, and clear relevance between the pre-clinical and clinical studies, resulting in the huge difficulties to obtain regulatory and ethics approval. Therefore, such relatively complex stimulus-sensitive nano-DDSs are not currently approved for clinical use. In this review, we highlight the recent advances of smart nanoplatforms for targeting drug delivery. Furthermore, the clinical translation obstacles faced by these smart nanoplatforms have been reviewed and discussed. We also present the future directions and perspectives of stimuli-sensitive DDS in clinical applications.

Enhancing regenerative approaches with nanoparticles

“…In recent years, increased focus has been on making these nanoparticles 'smart' by adding features so that they can react to their biological environment to allow, for example, controlled drug release. This has been achieved by engineering these particles so that they can respond to changing enzyme levels, pH levels or redox levels [2][3][4]. Other efforts have been directed at creating nanoparticles that can actively target specific (diseased) cell populations by attaching cell targeting ligands to the outer surface of the nanoparticles [5,6].…”

A nanoliposome-based photoactivable drug delivery system for enhanced cancer therapy and overcoming treatment resistance

“…28,29 Among the stimuli-responsive controlled release DDSs, light-induced release DDSs have been attracted more and more attention due to their high spatial/ temporal resolution in vivo. [30][31][32] Herein, in this study, a PNL was designed and synthesized.…”

Radiation‐Sensitive Dendrimer‐Based Drug Delivery System

“…Disulfide cross‐linking has been combined with internal and external stimuli for drug delivery. Stimuli‐responsive biomaterials have been developed and are increasingly used for controlled drug delivery 29. The G4.5 polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimer is a highly branched, biocompatible, and monodispersive fourth‐generation polymer with a variable pH‐dependent conformation, symmetric branches, and 128 surface carboxylate groups, and has been widely used in drug delivery systems 30.…”