Abstract
Polymeric nanofibers (NFs) have been extensively reported as a biocompatible scaffold to be specifically applied in several researching fields, including biomedical applications. The principal researching lines cover the encapsulation of antitumor drugs for controlled drug delivery applications, scaffolds structures for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, as well as magnetic or plasmonic hyperthermia to be applied in the reduction of cancer tumors. This makes NFs useful as therapeutic implantable patches or mats to be implemented in numerous biomedical researching fields. In this context, several biocompatible polymers with excellent biocompatibility and biodegradability including poly lactic-co-glycolic acid (PLGA), poly butylcyanoacrylate (PBCA), poly ethylenglycol (PEG), poly (ε-caprolactone) (PCL) or poly lactic acid (PLA) have been widely used for the synthesis of NFs using the electrospun technique. Indeed, other types of polymers with stimuli-responsive capabilities has have recently reported for the fabrication of polymeric NFs scaffolds with relevant biomedical applications. Importantly, colloidal nanoparticles used as nanocarriers and non-biodegradable structures have been also incorporated by electrospinning into polymeric NFs for drug delivery applications and cancer treatments. In this review, we focus on the incorporation of drugs into polymeric NFs for drug delivery and cancer treatment applications. However, the principal novelty compared with previously reported publications is that we also focus on recent investigations concerning new strategies that increase drug delivery and cancer treatments efficiencies, such as the incorporation of colloidal nanoparticles into polymeric NFs, the possibility to fabricate NFs with the capability to respond to external environments, and finally, the synthesis of hybrid polymeric NFs containing carbon nanotubes, magnetic and gold nanoparticles, with magnetic and plasmonic hyperthermia applicability.
Highlights
The improvement of chemotherapeutic treatments in cancer patients is seriously limited by the difficulty of increasing the ability of drugs to target tumor cells, reducing their toxicity in healthy cells
Among a great number of nanoformulations, such as liposomes [5], micelles [6], Pickering emulsions [7], dendrimers [8] or nanoemulsions [9], polymeric nanoparticles (NPs) have been extensively reported as drug delivery systems to be applied in, for example, the chemotherapeutic treatment of solid tumors [9]. These NPs can be composed by synthetic polymers such as polylactic acid (PLA), poly lactic-co-glycolic acid (PLGA) or polyethylene glycol (PEG) [10,11], which in principle can be administered as colloidal systems and dispersed in a solution by means of intravenous administration
Electrospinning is a technique used worldwid1e7that allows the fabrication of polymeric NFs in the range of micro- and nanometers
Summary
The improvement of chemotherapeutic treatments in cancer patients is seriously limited by the difficulty of increasing the ability of drugs to target tumor cells, reducing their toxicity in healthy cells. Two examples are poly(N-Isopropylacrylamide) (pNIPAM) and poly(4-vinylpyridine), which are the most investigated thermo- and pH-responsive polymers, respectively By using this technique, the fiber diameter can be modulated by several polymer solution properties as viscosity, elasticity, polymer concentration and conductivity, the electric field strength, the distance between the injector and the metal collector, or other external parameters as temperature and humidity. The fiber diameter can be modulated by several polymer solution properties as viscosity, elasticity, polymer concentration and conductivity, the electric field strength, the distance between the injector and the metal collector, or other external parameters as temperature and humidity These NFs can incorporate and accumulate chemotherapeutic molecules by means of two main approaches [21]; (i) Blend electrospinning, which is based on mixing a drug with a polymeric solution prior to electrospinning process or (ii) Coaxial electrospinning, which is basically a simultaneous co-spinning of two polymeric liquids. We include recent investigation in 3 major items: (i) the incorporation of particles as nanocarriers into the NFs (vesicles, micelles or silica particles), which are able to increase drug accumulations, (ii) the fabrication of polymeric NFs with the capability to respond to external environments, and (iii) the generation of hybrid systems structured as polymeric NFs containing CNTs, magnetic and gold nanoparticles for hyperthermia applicability
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