Abstract
Despite all sorts of innovations in medical researches over the past decades, cancer remains a major threat to human health. Mitochondria are essential organelles in eukaryotic cells, and their dysfunctions contribute to numerous diseases including cancers. Mitochondria-targeted cancer therapy, which specifically delivers drugs into the mitochondria, is a promising strategy for enhancing anticancer treatment efficiency. However, owing to their special double-layered membrane system and highly negative potentials, mitochondria remain a challenging target for therapeutic agents to reach and access. Polymeric nanoparticles exceed in cancer therapy ascribed to their unique features including ideal biocompatibility, readily design and synthesis, as well as flexible ligand decoration. Significant efforts have been put forward to develop mitochondria-targeted polymeric nanoparticles. In this review, we focused on the smart design of polymeric nanosystems for mitochondria targeting and summarized the current applications in improving cancer therapy.
Highlights
Cancer is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide (Sung et al, 2021)
The results demonstrated that the multifunctional polymeric nanomedicines exhibited effective mitochondria targeting, severely quenched near infrared (NIR)-fluorescence, and much higher photothermal behavior
This study demonstrated that LND-mPoP-NPs exhibited a more reproducible tumor growth inhibition in comparison with LND in a xenograft breast cancer mice model empowered by the mitochondria targeting capability of mitochondria penetrating peptides (MPPs)
Summary
Cancer is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide (Sung et al, 2021). Faced with such threat, tremendous efforts have been dedicated in finding better and effective approaches to enhance therapeutic outcomes (Allahyari et al, 2017; Singh et al, 2018; Souza et al, 2019; Meric-Bernstam, 2021). In the past 2 decades, mitochondria have become an attractive targeting site for anticancer treatment, and a wide collection of potential agents acting on mitochondria have emerged (Fulda et al, 2010; Lin et al, 2018; Huang et al, 2021). These agents generally target mitochondria functions, leading to cancer cell apoptosis via diverse mechanisms (Jeong and Seol, 2008). This review will highlight the diverse strategies adopted in designs of mitochondria targeting polymeric nanocarriers for robust cancer therapies (Scheme 1), existing challenges and unexplored methods are explored
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