Hybrid Vesicular Drug Delivery Systems for Cancer Therapeutics

Abstract

Nanoscale vesicles have provided a versatile platform for the transportation of various types of anticancer and diagnostic agents. Vesicular carriers comprised of liposomes, polymersomes, and peptide-based vesicles have exhibited potential characteristics for nanomedicine developments. However, the represented systems and current therapeutic approaches to cancers are confronted with serious limitations that hinder their clinical translation. The aforementioned limitations could be minimized by implementing combinatorial hybrid systems. With this method, hybrid vesicular systems can integrate the advantages of several carriers into one structure thereby resulting in an increased therapeutic index and better clinical outcome. The current study has reviewed recently introduced types of hybrid vesicles made of polymer-lipids, polymer-peptides, and lipid-peptides, and its main focus is on multiple metallic-based nanoparticles incorporated into vesicular carriers to provide theranostic platforms and to boost the efficient cytotoxic effects of the delivered agents.

Harnessed Dopant Block Copolymers Assist Decorating Membrane Pores: A Dissipative Particle Dynamics Study

“…The precise control of pore features, for example, shape, stability, and chemistry, has been reported to be essential for the tunability of solute transport engineering, in some cases distinguishing different solutes by size or geometry, while in other cases affecting the ability of pore formation and shape transformation under external stimuli . Recently, hybrid BCP membranes with the addition of dopants as pore controller have gained increasing attention due to their capability to independently manipulate the pore regions and membrane matrix . Enormous efforts have been devoted to the design of promising dopants possessing unique intrinsic architectures, as well as assembled nanostructures, in order to diversify the pore structure .…”

Interface Engineering in Multiphase Systems toward Synthetic Cells and Organelles: From Soft Matter Fundamentals to Biomedical Applications

“…Hybrid vesicles here are referring to vesicles with membranes that are the hybrid of fatty acids, phospholipids, block/graft copolymers, molecular surfactants, amphiphilic peptide, or nanoparticles. [46,47,49,54] Other lipid-polymer hybrid systems that are not bilayer vesicles are not discussed here. Most hybrid vesicles of block/graft copolymers and lipids are motivated by combining the biocompatibility and fluidity of lipid vesicles, and the mechanical/thermal stability and chemical variability of polymer vesicles.…”

“…Cells are the most basic and functional building blocks of all living organisms. They are highly complex and efficient as vesicles, [44][45][46][47][48][49] capsosome, [5] colloidosome, [50] coacervate droplets, [26,[51][52][53] and stimuli-responsive compartments. [54,55] Owing to the progress in fabrication techniques and understanding of cellular functions, the progress in the functionalities of synthetic cells has been tremendous.…”

Nanoneedle Platforms: The Many Ways to Pierce the Cell Membrane

“…To this end, a great variety of techniques have been established for crossing the cell membrane, [ 5–9 ] which are mainly classified into biochemical carrier‐mediated and membrane penetration‐mediated approaches. [ 10 ] Generally, the former methods require packaging cargo biomolecules with chemical delivery systems (cationic lipids and polymers), [ 11–13 ] biological reagents (cell penetrating peptides, viral vectors, and vesicles), [ 14–17 ] or nanomaterials; [ 18–20 ] these often suffer from low efficiency, cell‐type specificity, low cell viability, or biosafety concerns. Comparatively, the membrane penetration‐mediated approaches utilize physical stimuli such as microinjection, [ 21,22 ] patch clamping, [ 23,24 ] and electroporation [ 25,26 ] to perforate the cell membrane, allowing for delivery of a broad range of materials into various cell types, or direct intracellular sensing.…”