Chapter 13 - Smart drug delivery systems and their clinical potential

Abstract

Advancements in materials science and nanomedicine have steered the expansion of smart nanosystems for therapeutics delivery, bioimaging, and theragnostic applications. The smart drug delivery systems (SDDSs) are responsive to a specific stimulus, enabling the delivery of payloads in a spatiotemporal fashion. In the past three decades, several stimuli-responsive drug delivery systems (DDSs) had been immensely researched for numerous clinical applications, the most interesting being those developed for the treatment of intractable tumors. For stimuli-responsive DDSs, biocompatible and stimuli-sensitive materials are instrumental in their design and development. These smart materials undergo protonation, bond rupture, or altered molecular conformation in response to a stimulus for the site-specific and controlled delivery of the payloads when incorporated in stimuli-responsive nanosystems. In this chapter, we discuss the salient features of the stimuli-responsive DDSs that involve endogenous stimuli such as redox, pH, and enzymes or exogenous stimuli such as temperature, magnetic field, ultrasound, and light. The major obstacles accountable for the limited clinical development of different stimuli-responsive DDSs are also presented.