Abstract
The discovery of paclitaxel (PTX) has been a milestone in anti-cancer therapy and has promoted the development and marketing of various formulations that have revolutionized the therapeutic approach towards several malignancies. Despite its peculiar anti-cancer activity, the physico-chemical properties of PTX compromise the administration of the compound in polar media. Because of this, since the development of the first Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved formulation (Taxol®), consistent efforts have been made to obtain suitable delivery systems able to preserve/increase PTX efficacy and to overcome the side effects correlated to the presence of some excipients. The exploitation of natural polymers as potential materials for drug delivery purposes has favored the modulation of the bioavailability and the pharmacokinetic profiles of the drug, and in this regard, several formulations have been developed that allow the controlled release of the active compound. In this mini-review, the recent advances concerning the design and applications of natural polymer-based hydrogels containing PTX-loaded biocompatible nanocarriers are discussed. The technological features of these formulations as well as the therapeutic outcome achieved following their administration will be described, demonstrating their potential role as innovative systems to be used in anti-tumor therapy.
Highlights
It was interesting to observe a certain anti-proliferative activity of the empty chitosan-based hydrogels, confirming the results previously reported by Ruél-Gariépi and coworkers [138]
The results demonstrated that Tet can efficiently sensitize gastric cancer cells to PTX and suggests that their association may represent a conceivable approach for the management of gastric cancer
Oncogel®, a thermosensitive PLGA-PEG-PLGA copolymer-based hydrogel, is the only formulation ever proposed for the local release of PTX in solid tumors, but it brought about no significant improvements in terms of anti-tumor efficacy, so it did not reach the market [195,196]
Summary
Many drugs currently being used in clinical practice are obtained from natural sources. Paclitaxel (PTX) is one of the most successful antineoplastic agents coming from a natural source that is available today It belongs to the Taxanes family and has a peculiar mechanism of action that has been employed to treat several types of malignancies [2,3,4]. Taxus baccata), but its use was initially hampered because of both the non-ecological sustainability of the isolation procedure and the inadequate yield of the resulting compound [9] To overcome these difficulties, in 1994, a semisynthetic approach involving acylation of the precursor 10-deacetylbaccatin III was provided [10,11,12], and since several other alternative methods for its development have been proposed, including microbial fermentation engineering [13,14]. The aim here is to describe the physicochemical features of these formulations, discussing the applications of injectable in situ forming hydrogels for the delivery of PTX (Figure 2)
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