Abstract
Polymeric nanoparticles have been widely used as carriers of drugs and bioimaging agents due to their excellent biocompatibility, biodegradability, and structural versatility. The principal application of polymeric nanoparticles in medicine is for cancer therapy, with increased tumor accumulation, precision delivery of anticancer drugs to target sites, higher solubility of pharmaceutical properties and lower systemic toxicity. Recently, the stimuli-responsive polymeric nanoplatforms attracted more and more attention because they can change their physicochemical properties responding to the stimuli conditions, such as low pH, enzyme, redox agents, hypoxia, light, temperature, magnetic field, ultrasound, and so on. Moreover, the unique properties of stimuli-responsive polymeric nanocarriers in target tissues may significantly improve the bioactivity of delivered agents for cancer treatment. This review introduces stimuli-responsive polymeric nanoparticles and their applications in tumor theranostics with the loading of chemical drugs, nucleic drugs and imaging molecules. In addition, we discuss the strategy for designing multifunctional polymeric nanocarriers and provide the perspective for the clinical applications of these stimuli-responsive polymeric nanoplatforms.
Highlights
Polymeric nanomaterials have gained much attention in medicine due to their unique advanced properties in cancer theranostics at the molecular level (Ren et al, 2016; Ekladious et al, 2019)
Li et al conjugated poly glycolic acid (PGA) with gadolinium (Gd) and paclitaxel and imaged tumor necrosis after administration using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (Jackson et al, 2007); Lu et al monitored the therapeutic efficacy of photodynamic therapy (PDT) on xenograft tumors by administration of PGA-photo-sensitizer/Gd conjugates with contrast-enhanced MRI (Vaidya et al, 2006)
Recent advances of stimuli-responsive polymeric nanocarriers in the development of drug delivery are discussed in cancer therapy, where stimuli-responsive polymeric nanocarriers have been shown to own the possibility of controlled release of drugs/genes at the target sites by acting as an active participant rather than passive mediators
Summary
Polymeric nanomaterials have gained much attention in medicine due to their unique advanced properties in cancer theranostics at the molecular level (Ren et al, 2016; Ekladious et al, 2019). The polymeric nanocarriers with the loading of therapeutic drugs and imaging agents are promising to overcome the biological barriers for the theranostics of cancer (Li and Pu, 2020; Xu et al, 2021). Within these polymeric nanoplatforms, the designed smart. A better understanding of the physiological environments-based stimuli of cancers and further improvement of the polymer-based nanocarrier systems are necessary for targeted therapeutic drug delivery applications. We focus on introducing stimuli-responsive polymerbased nanoplatforms and combined with imaging agents and drug/gene molecules for cancer treatment and diagnosis
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