Abstract
Micelles as colloidal suspension have attracted considerable attention due to their potential use for both cancer diagnosis and therapy. These structures have proven their ability to deliver poorly water-soluble anticancer drugs, improve drug stability, and have good penetration and site-specificity, leading to enhance therapeutic efficacy. Micelles are composed of hydrophobic and hydrophilic components assembled into nanosized spherical, ellipsoid, cylindrical, or unilamellar structures. For their simple formation, they are widely studied, either by using opposite polymers attachment consisting of two or more block copolymers, or by using fatty acid molecules that can modify themselves in a rounded shape. Recently, hybrid and responsive stimuli nanomicelles are formed either by integration with metal nanoparticles such as silver, gold, iron oxide nanoparticles inside micelles or by a combination of lipids and polymers into single composite. Herein, through this special issue, an updated overview of micelles development and their application for cancer therapy will be discussed.
Highlights
Step 1: Assembly of chitosan and oleic acid; step 2: Folic acid (FA) conjugation with bovine serum albumin; and step 3: functionalization of chitosan grafted oleic acid surface by using bovine serum albumin (BSA)-FA (Figure adapted with permission from ref. [53])
This approach could be useful in circumstances that require different outer coronas of the micelles, rather than the one that is used in the nano-reactor scheme for metal nanoparticle production (Scheme 4) [58]
O/W, direct dialysis, and co-solvent evaporation are well suited for the encapsulation of hydrophobic drugs, whereas W/O/W is often preferred for the encapsulation of more hydrophilic compounds [72]
Summary
Micelles are assembled colloidal dispersions having a small diameter, normally ranging from 5 to 100 nm [1,2], depending on the type of head groups and length of the alkyl chains [3,4]. The non-polar hydrocarbon chain âtailâ can be arranged into the center of a ball like structure âheadâ to form a micelle, because they are hydrophobic or âwater hatingâ (Scheme 1) [6,7]. They can be formed from a fatty acid, a salt of a fatty acid (soap), phospholipids, or other similar molecules. In micelle structure formation, the interaction between the polar head groups and surrounding water might cause separation between hydrophobic and hydrophilic regimens This results in flexible and porous micelles [11]. Micelles are considered a suitable model for biological applications and drug delivery systems [12], because they can increase drug solubility, reduce toxicity, prolong circulation time, enhance tissue penetration, and have targeting ability
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