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Theranostics 2021; 11(13):6370-6392. doi:10.7150/thno.57828 This issue Cite

Review

Recent progress in nanomedicine for enhanced cancer chemotherapy

Guoqing Wei^1✉#, Yu Wang^1#, Guang Yang², Yi Wang³, Rong Ju¹

1. Chengdu Women's and Children's Central Hospital, School of Medicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, PR China.
2. College of Medicine, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 610031, PR China.
3. School of Life Science and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 610031, PR China.
#These authors contributed equally to this work.

✉ Corresponding author: E-mail: 502492618com (G. Wei).

Abstract

As one of the most important cancer treatment strategies, conventional chemotherapy has substantial side effects and leads easily to cancer treatment failure. Therefore, exploring and developing more efficient methods to enhance cancer chemotherapy is an urgently important problem that must be solved. With the development of nanotechnology, nanomedicine has showed a good application prospect in improving cancer chemotherapy. In this review, we aim to present a discussion on the significant research progress in nanomedicine for enhanced cancer chemotherapy. First, increased enrichment of drugs in tumor tissues relying on different targeting ligands and promoting tissue penetration are summarized. Second, specific subcellular organelle-targeted chemotherapy is discussed. Next, different combinational strategies to reverse multidrug resistance (MDR) and improve the effective intracellular concentration of therapeutics are discussed. Furthermore, the advantages of combination therapy for cancer treatment are emphasized. Finally, we discuss the major problems facing therapeutic nanomedicine for cancer chemotherapy, and propose possible future directions in this field.

Keywords: chemotherapy, combination therapy, nanocarriers, nanomedicine, cancer therapy

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