Revisiting the ‘One Material Fits All’ Rule for Cancer Nanotherapy

Abstract

The promise of (nano)biomaterials for the treatment of cancer can only be realized following a comprehensive scrutiny of the tumor microenvironment. The generic use of 'inert' vehicles that deliver a specific cargo to treat a range of cancer types and disease states obeys the 'one material fits all' rule. However, this approach leads to suboptimal and unpredictable clinical outcomes. The key factors constructing the tumor milieu should guide the design of disease-responsive materials. Given the growing availability of nanomaterials for cancer therapy, a material that responds to each patient's needs and, hence, reacts in a graded manner based on disease cues, would pave the way to precision materials for cancer therapy.

Rational engineering and applications of functional bioadhesives in biomedical engineering

“…However, the injured tissue environment differs from that of normal tissue. [163] More specifically, an injured tissue environment largely differs in pH values and shows increased inflammatory cytokines and macrophage cells. These pathological factors can critically affect functional bioadhesives.…”

Self-Assembled Organic Nanomaterials for Drug Delivery, Bioimaging, and Cancer Therapy

“…In general, each therapy such as chemotherapy, PTT, or PDT is effective to some extent, yet the eventual practical outcome of a single anticancer treatment remains unsatisfactory. That is attributed to the tumor heterogeneity and complexity of tumor microenvironment as well as tumor pathophysiology, which could not be fully addressed by a monotherapy modality. ,, This deficiency has inspired combinatorial paradigms that integrate different anticancer treatments showing a synergistic and complementary effect. Therefore, development of simple organic-component-based self-assembled nanomaterials for multimodality and multifunctional cancer therapy is highly desirable as a future research topic in the nanomedicine filed.…”

An analysis on Cancer Nanotherapy: does Nanotechnology have a delivery problem?

“…There is more in delivering materials than meets the eye. In fact, the tumor microenvironment is a rough neighborhood for nanomaterials [15]. Tumors create skewed neighborhoods, embedded with their leaky and chaotic blood vessels that are like broken roads or damaged sewers.…”

“…The ultimate goal must be to create systems like the idea of a local patch, that provides sustained and highly efficient delivery of the therapeutic cargos and which may potentiate the development of individualized therapy based on the patient's biological information within the biomolecular cancer profiling. It is now imperative to develop a new and more effective treatment strategy following a comprehensive scrutiny and understanding of the tumor microenvironment and host response to different therapeutic modalities based locally tunable therapeutic cargos [15]. This approach will certainly be attractive for drug discovery since this type of analysis captures mechanisms operating in the tumor in its entirety, whilst pinpointing therapeutic targets, which can be selectively modulated to modify response and in response to therapy.…”