Combinatorial therapeutic strategies for enhanced delivery of therapeutics to brain cancer cells through nanocarriers: current trends and future perspectives

Abstract

Brain cancer is the most aggressive one among various cancers. It has a drastic impact on people's lives because of the failure in treatment efficacy of the currently employed strategies. Various strategies used to relieve pain in brain cancer patients and to prolong survival time include radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and surgery. Nevertheless, several inevitable limitations are accompanied by such treatments due to unsatisfactory curative effects. Generally, the treatment of cancers is very challenging due to many reasons including drugs’ intrinsic factors and physiological barriers. Blood-brain barrier (BBB) and blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier (BCSFB) are the two additional hurdles in the way of therapeutic agents to brain tumors delivery. Combinatorial and targeted therapies specifically in cancer show a very promising role where nanocarriers’ based formulations are designed primarily to achieve tumor-specific drug release. A dual-targeting strategy is a versatile way of chemotherapeutics delivery to brain tumors that gets the aid of combined ligands and mediators that cross the BBB and reaches the target site efficiently. In contrast to single targeting where one receptor or mediator is targeted, the dual-targeting strategy is expected to produce a multiple-fold increase in therapeutic efficacy for cancer therapy, especially in brain tumors. In a nutshell, a dual-targeting strategy for brain tumors enhances the delivery efficiency of chemotherapeutic agents via penetration across the blood-brain barrier and enhances the targeting of tumor cells. This review article highlights the ongoing status of the brain tumor therapy enhanced by nanoparticle based delivery with the aid of dual-targeting strategies. The future perspectives in this regard have also been highlighted.

Biomimetic nanoparticles for tumor immunotherapy

“…To differentiate these cells, researchers use chemical/physical methods in different surface modification of nanoparticle targeting ligands ( Thomsen and Klok, 2021 ) [antibodies ( Arslan et al, 2021 ), antibody fragments ( Marques et al, 2020 ), proteins ( Yoo et al, 2019 ), small molecules ( Jahangirian et al, 2019 ), the aptamer ( Fu and Xiang, 2020 ) and peptides ( Gao et al, 2021a ), etc.]. These ligands should have excessive expression of receptors on specific cancer cells but normal or minimum expression in the normal healthy cells ( Wang et al, 2022c ). At the same time, these ligand molecules should have a high affinity for their homologous receptors and the innate ability to induce receptor-mediated endocytosis.…”

Hsp70‐Targeting and Size‐Tunable Nanoparticles Combine with PD‐1 Checkpoint Blockade to Treat Glioma

“…[1][2][3] Nanocarriers have been developed and widely used to change the distribution of free drugs in vivo. [4][5][6][7] they are potential at decreasing side effects in healthy tissues by reducing the exposure of free drugs in normal tissues, but the performance in promoting tumor targeting efficiency is still limited. [8][9][10][11] Since physicochemical properties deeply influence the in vivo fate, [12][13][14][15] such as surface modification, charge, and particle size, it's important to optimize these properties to increase the selectivity and specificity of nanoparticles.…”

Eczema as a protective factor for brain cancer: a meta-analysis

“…Brain cancer is one of the most aggressive tumors owing to poor treatment effects [ 1 , 2 ]. More than 90% of brain tumors occur in the brain parenchyma, with the remainder occurring in the meninges, spinal cord, and cranial nerves [ 3 , 4 ].…”