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

Abstract

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 stimuliresponsive nanocarriers which appear to have a promising future in medicine.

Laser-driven structural transformations in dextran-graft-PNIPAM copolymer/Au nanoparticles hybrid nanosystem: the role of plasmon heating and attractive optical forces

“…In this respect, PNIPAM has been proposed as the stimuli responsive carrier of the NPs. 51,52 These applications of PNIPAM/Au NPs hybrids need the knowledge of the peculiarities of the laser-induced phase transition in the PNIPAM/Au NPs system at the nanoscale. The SPR in the Au NPs with its famous sensor properties gives such possibility.…”

Multifunctional and stimuli-responsive nanocarriers for targeted therapeutic delivery

“…In addition, these nanocarriers sometime contain another component such as a targeting ligand or adhesion ligand which is specific to its receptor on target cells or tissues. Various stimulisensitive nanocarriers developed for drug and gene delivery application have been summarized in Table 2 [34,38,39,40,[116][117][118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125][126]. We will be discussing various endogenous or exogenous stimuli-responsive nanocarriers for targeted therapeutic delivery applications.…”

Nanotherapeutics for multiple myeloma

“…By relying on intrinsic processes to release drugs from NP, it is expected that similar events will occur in non-tumour tissue, including the major excretion organs such as the liver and the kidneys, leading to off-target toxicity. One way to decrease systemic toxicity is to load NP with inactive drugs (pro-drug) and stimulate the release at the target sites via specific stimuli such as the acidic microenvironment in tumours, increased levels of reactive oxygen species, high protease activity, or other factors (Hatakeyama, 2017). However, optimizing externally triggered drug release method could overcome this potential obstacle to human translation of NP.…”