Kandasamy Saravanakumar, Xiaowen Hu, Davoodbasha M. Ali and Myeong-Hyeon Wang* Pages 2609 - 2625 ( 17 )
The conventional Drug Delivery System (DDS) has limitations such as leakage of the drug, toxicity to normal cells and loss of drug efficiency, while the stimuli-responsive DDS is non-toxic to cells, avoiding the leakage and degradation of the drug because of its targeted drug delivery to the pathological site. Thus nanomaterial chemistry enables - the development of smart stimuli-responsive DDS over the conventional DDS. Stimuliresponsive DDS ensures spatial or temporal, on-demand drug delivery to the targeted cancer cells. The DDS is engineered by using the organic (synthetic polymers, liposomes, peptides, aptamer, micelles, dendrimers) and inorganic (zinc oxide, gold, magnetic, quantum dots, metal oxides) materials. Principally, these nanocarriers release the drug at the targeted cells in response to external and internal stimuli such as temperature, light, ultrasound and magnetic field, pH value, redox potential (glutathione), and enzyme. The multi-stimuli responsive DDS is more promising than the single stimuli-responsive DDS in cancer therapy, and it extensively increases drug release and accumulation in the targeted cancer cells, resulting in better tumor cell ablation. In this regard, a handful of multi-stimuli responsive DDS is in clinical trials for further approval. A comprehensive review is crucial for addressing the existing knowledge about multi-stimuli responsive DDS, and hence, we summarized the emerging strategies in tailored ligand functionalized stimuli-responsive nanocarriers as the DDS for cancer therapies.
Nanomedicine, stimuli-responsive nanocarriers, polymers, enzymes, ligands, cancer therapy.
Department of Medical Biotechnology, College of Biomedical Sciences, Kangwon National University, Chuncheon, Gangwon, 24341, Department of Medical Biotechnology, College of Biomedical Sciences, Kangwon National University, Chuncheon, Gangwon, 24341, School of Life Sciences, B.S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai - 600048, Tamil Nadu, Department of Medical Biotechnology, College of Biomedical Sciences, Kangwon National University, Chuncheon, Gangwon, 24341