Abstract
The efficacy of pharmaceutical agents can be greatly improved through nanocarrier delivery. Encapsulation of pharmaceutical agents into a nanocarrier can enhance their bioavailability and biocompatibility, whilst also facilitating targeted drug delivery to specific locations within the body. However, detailed understanding of the in vivo activity of the nanocarrier-drug conjugate is required prior to regulatory approval as a safe and effective treatment strategy. A comprehensive understanding of how nanocarriers travel to, and interact with, the intended target is required in order to optimize the dosing strategy, reduce potential off-target effects, and unwanted toxic effects. Raman spectroscopy has received much interest as a mechanism for label-free, non-invasive imaging of nanocarrier modes of action in vivo. Advanced Raman imaging techniques, including coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), are paving the way for rigorous evaluation of nanocarrier activity at the single-cell level. This review focuses on the development of Raman imaging techniques to study organic nanocarrier delivery in cells and tissues.
Highlights
Nanocarrier-drug conjugates can improve drug solubility and can increase the lifetime of a drug in vivo; this is especially important for protein therapeutics, which are sensitive to changes in environment and are often metabolized to an inactive form before they have reached their target site [6]
The sustained release mechanism from a nanocarrier can allow the dosage of drug administered to be lowered, increasing safety, and can increase time spent in the therapeutic window without the need for sequential dosing [7]
The cross-section of spontaneous Raman scattering is extremely small compared to fluorescence [32], which can limit the speed of acquisition of biological images by Raman spectroscopy [33]
Summary
Nanocarriers are used as drug delivery vehicles, both in research and clinical settings, because of their ability to encapsulate therapeutics and give controlled release in a biological environment [1,2,3,4]. Nanocarrier-drug conjugates can improve drug solubility and can increase the lifetime of a drug in vivo; this is especially important for protein therapeutics, which are sensitive to changes in environment and are often metabolized to an inactive form before they have reached their target site [6]. Especially protein-based, do not fit leading to significant efforts to deliver drugs to the brain inside nanocarriers [14,15]. Representationofofdifferent different materials which fabricatedinto intonanocarriers, nanocarriers, such (e.g., alginate), synthetic polymers (e.g., PLGA), and fabricated suchasasbiopolymers biopolymers (e.g., PLGA), lipids (as liposomes and micelles). In this review we will describe efforts to image polymeric and lipid-based nanocarriers using Raman spectroscopy, which can offer label-free contrast based on molecular vibrations in the sample
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