Abstract
Brain cancers, mainly high-grade gliomas/glioblastoma, are characterized by uncontrolled proliferation and recurrence with an extremely poor prognosis. Despite various conventional treatment strategies, viz., resection, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, the outcomes are still inefficient against glioblastoma. The blood–brain barrier is one of the major issues that affect the effective delivery of drugs to the brain for glioblastoma therapy. Various studies have been undergone in order to find novel therapeutic strategies for effective glioblastoma treatment. The advent of nanodiagnostics, i.e., imaging combined with therapies termed as nanotheranostics, can improve the therapeutic efficacy by determining the extent of tumour distribution prior to surgery as well as the response to a treatment regimen after surgery. Polymer nanoparticles gain tremendous attention due to their versatile nature for modification that allows precise targeting, diagnosis, and drug delivery to the brain with minimal adverse side effects. This review addresses the advancements of polymer nanoparticles in drug delivery, diagnosis, and therapy against brain cancer. The mechanisms of drug delivery to the brain of these systems and their future directions are also briefly discussed.
Highlights
The reduced efficacy of brain cancer therapy is mainly attributed to the presence of the blood–brain barrier (BBB) that limits the permeation of systemically applied drugs into the brain [3]
It is termed as blood–brain tumour barrier (BBTB) or blood–tumour barrier (BTB) [14] (Figure 1)
Hydrophilic moleculescan and cannot the BBB that attributed to the theseionic, drawbacks, nanoparticles bethus utilised for cross the controlled and is sustained delivery requirement of a higher systemic that results severe sidestudied effects [11]
Summary
The reduced efficacy of brain cancer therapy is mainly attributed to the presence of the blood–brain barrier (BBB) that limits the permeation of systemically applied drugs into the brain [3]. Radiation therapy can be delivered internally or externally and is regarded as the standard treatment for high-grade gliomas [22]. Chemotherapy drugs such as carmustine (BCNU) can cross the BBB and target glioma cells directly [20]. Standard treatments remain ineffective due to poor surgical resection of tumours, mainly the infiltrative ones, poor chemo-therapeutic drug influx to the tumour site, and BBB that restrict them from diffusing toward tumour location [25]. Higher doses are needed to attain desired therapeutic efficacy which causes undesirable side effects [27]
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