Smart materials for drug delivery and cancer therapy

Abstract

Until now, enormous smart materials have been engineered with endogenous stimulators such as pH, reactive oxygen species, glutathione, hypoxia and enzyme, or exogenous stimulators such as temperature, light, ultrasound, radiation, and magnetic field in drug delivery. As footstone of stimuli‐responsive nanocarriers, endogenous/exogenous responsive smart materials possess many properties, such as responding ability to specific triggers, controlled drug release, long blood circulation, increased tumor accumulation, “ON‐OFF” switch activities, enhanced diagnostic accuracy, and therapeutic efficacy. Smart materials have attracted considerable attention because they provide likelihood strategy for individualized and comprehensive therapy. In this review, significant research achievements of smart materials responsive to different triggers including their synthesis and formulation mechanism, responsive mechanism, applications, multiple functions are summarized and discussed separately. We primarily focus on the studies in the past few years (2017‐2020). The current situation and remaining challenges of stimuli‐sensitive materials‐based nanocarriers for clinical translation are discussed rationally at the end. It is hope that this timely and overall review would provide some helpful information for researchers in this field.

Black phosphorus-Au-thiosugar nanosheets mediated photothermal induced anti-tumor effect enhancement by promoting infiltration of NK cells in hepatocellular carcinoma

“…Thus, combinational platform of BPNS and auranofin (BATNS) could overcome the shortcomings of BPNS and auranofin but retains their advantages, along with the combination therapy on cancer, which potentially improve the therapeutic efficacy. Moreover, an increasing number of literatures have reported that various stress proteins (such as heat shock protein, calreticulin and high mobility group protein B1) could be generated under PTT environment and improved the immunogenicity of tumor cells [ 31 – 34 ]. Therefore, the combination of PTT and BATNS application might show a better tumor ablation and a stronger induction on host immune response.…”

Manganese-doped gold nanoclusters with ultrasmall size andmicroenvironment-responsive visualized theranostics of tumor

“…纳米酶在肿瘤微环境响应的 CDT/PDT 中研究较多 [10][11][12] . 无机纳米材料具有优异的磁、光、电、声和热等响 应特性，可以作为智能响应型纳米酶，在肿瘤可视 化诊疗中显示出潜在的应用前景 [13] .韩国国立首尔大…”

Engineered gold/black phosphorus nanoplatforms with remodeling tumor microenvironment for sonoactivated catalytic tumor theranostics

“…Redox homeostasis is of great significance to maintain the various normal physiological functions of the organism [ 1 ]. Disturbance in this balance can induce genetic mutations, metabolic abnormalities, and alteration in the microenvironments, thus leading to the occurrence of many diseases, such as cancers [ [2] , [3] , [4] ]. Although moderate levels of ROS in cancer cells have been considered to be associated with the development of cancer, excessive accumulation of intracellular ROS above a threshold can induce cell death by damaging nucleic acids, lipids, proteins, and other cellular constituents.…”