Stimuli-responsive Nanocarriers For Drug Delivery Research Articles

Stimuli-responsive nanocarriers for drug delivery, tumor imaging, therapy and theranostics.

In recent years, much progress has been motivated in stimuli-responsive nanocarriers, which could response to the intrinsic physicochemical and pathological factors in diseased regions to increase the specificity of drug delivery. Currently, numerous nanocarriers have been engineered with physicochemical changes in responding to external stimuli, such as ultrasound, thermal, light and magnetic field, as well as internal stimuli, including pH, redox potential, hypoxia and enzyme, etc. Nanocarriers could respond to stimuli in tumor microenvironments or inside cancer cells for on-demanded drug delivery and accumulation, controlled drug release, activation of bioactive compounds, probes and targeting ligands, as well as size, charge and conformation conversion, etc., leading to sensing and signaling, overcoming multidrug resistance, accurate diagnosis and precision therapy. This review has summarized the general strategies of developing stimuli-responsive nanocarriers and recent advances, presented their applications in drug delivery, tumor imaging, therapy and theranostics, illustrated the progress of clinical translation and made prospects.

Recent Progress and Advances in Stimuli-Responsive Polymers for Cancer Therapy.

The conventional chemotherapeutic agents, used for cancer chemotherapy, have major limitations including non-specificity, ubiquitous biodistribution, low concentration in tumor tissue, and systemic toxicity. In recent years, owing to their unique features, polymeric nanoparticles have been widely used for the target-specific delivery of drugs in the body. Although polymeric nanoparticles have addressed a number of important issues, the bioavailability of drugs at the disease site, and especially upon cellular internalization, remains a challenge. A polymer nanocarrier system with a stimuli-responsive property (e.g., pH, temperature, or redox potential), for example, would be amenable to address the intracellular delivery barriers by taking advantage of pH, temperature, or redox potentials. With a greater understanding of the difference between normal and pathological tissues, there is a highly promising role of stimuli-responsive nanocarriers for drug delivery in the future. In this review, we highlighted the recent advances in different types of stimuli-responsive polymers for drug delivery.

Recent Advances in Endogenous and Exogenous Stimuli-Responsive Nanocarriers for Drug Delivery and Therapeutics.

Significant progress has been achieved in the development of stimuli-responsive nanocarriers for drug delivery, diagnosis, and therapy. Various types of triggers are utilized in the development of nanocarrier delivery. Endogenous factors such as changes in pH, redox, gradient, and enzyme concentration which are linked to disease progression have been utilized for controlling biodistribution and releasing drugs from nanocarriers, as well as increasing subsequent pharmacological activity at the disease site. Nanocarriers which respond to artificially-induced exogenous factors (such as temperature, light, magnetic field, and ultrasound) have also been developed. This review aims to discuss recent advances in the design of stimuli-responsive nanocarriers which appear to have a promising future in medicine.

Endogenous Stimuli-responsive Nanocarriers for Drug Delivery

Drug release in a spatially and temporally controlled manner is highly desired in the field of drug delivery. Endogenous stimuli-responsive nanocarriers provide significant advantages in maximizing...

Carbon nanotube-based stimuli-responsive nanocarriers for drug delivery

In cancer therapy, smart nanocarriers are one of the most important nanoscale vectors of therapeutic agents.

Stimuli-Responsive Nanocarriers for Drug Delivery to the Central Nervous System

The blood–brain barrier (BBB) is a major obstacle to the effective delivery of therapeutic agents to the central nervous system (CNS). A small number of drugs have the potent ability to treat brain disease, but their efficiency is poor due to the existence of the BBB. Brain-targeted nanocarriers have been developed to overcome the BBB to increase drug accumulation in lesion regions in the brain and reduce toxicity in healthy brain tissue. Among these nanocarriers, stimuli-responsive nanocarriers (also known as smart nanocarriers) have become a hot topic in recent years. Stimuli-responsive nanocarriers can change their chemical structures or physical properties in response to environmental stimuli. When drugs or biomolecules are transported to certain regions of the brain, these changes can induce cargo release from the drug carrier to treat abnormal cells or tissues. These interesting characteristics provide us with an opportunity to endow various types of smart nanocarriers with the capability to response to single stimulus or multiple stimuli to release drugs at certain lesion regions. In current review, we describe the characteristics and function of the BBB and then focus on recent progress in stimuli-responsive nanocarriers targeting the brain. These naonocarriers include nanocarriers modified with pH-, redox-, photo- and enzyme-responsive polymers or band. We emphasize potential biological applications on brain diseases therapy of nanocarrier and their controlled release upon the application of different stimuli. Keywords: Blood brain barrier (BBB), central nervous system (CNS) disorders, external stimuli, internal stimuli, nanocarriers, stimuli-responsive.

Stimuli-responsive nanocarriers for drug delivery

Spurred by recent progress in materials chemistry and drug delivery, stimuli-responsive devices that deliver a drug in spatial-, temporal- and dosage-controlled fashions have become possible. Implementation of such devices requires the use of biocompatible materials that are susceptible to a specific physical incitement or that, in response to a specific stimulus, undergo a protonation, a hydrolytic cleavage or a (supra)molecular conformational change. In this Review, we discuss recent advances in the design of nanoscale stimuli-responsive systems that are able to control drug biodistribution in response to specific stimuli, either exogenous (variations in temperature, magnetic field, ultrasound intensity, light or electric pulses) or endogenous (changes in pH, enzyme concentration or redox gradients).