Multimodal Micelles for Theranostic Nanomedicine

Abstract

Theranostic nanomedicine has been extensively explored by integrating imaging and therapeutic agents within the nanocarriers for cancer theranostics. Polymeric micelles as a promising nanocarrier have received much attention for cancer therapy during the past two decades, owing to their good biocompatibility, high drug-loading capacity, enhanced cellular uptakes, preferable pharmacokinetics, as well as enhanced tumor accumulation and intracellular delivery. In this chapter, we focus on the recent progress of multimodal micelles as theranostic nanocarrier for cancer imaging and therapeutic applications. The integration of imaging and therapeutic agents into the micelles may provide imaging-guided cancer therapy and therapeutic monitoring. The theranostic micelles are highly capable of generating multimodal imaging capacities including spatial resolution and sensitivity and simultaneously synergistic cancer therapy with enhanced efficacy, since the polymer design and functionalization provide versatile tools for the fabrication of multifunctional theranostic micelles. The multimodal features provide complementary imaging information to achieve precise tumor identification for guiding cancer treatment and therapeutic monitoring. The synergistic anticancer efficacy is also preferable to those of the combinational treatment or mono-modal treatment. However, the exploration of theranostic micelles is still undergoing new challenges including injectable polymer development, complex preparation, precise control of nanostructure, insufficient loading capacity, various intracellular translocation demands of imaging and therapeutic agents, as well as desired imaging or therapeutic outcome, which might limit their clinical translation. The development of theranostic micelles needs more precise polymer design with clinical potential and reasonable integration of imaging and therapeutic agents in the future.