Targeted pharmaceutical nanocarriers for cancer therapy and imaging

Nanodrug applications in photodynamic therapy

“…Other putative benefits are lower toxicity, better biocompatibility and safety; ultimately they also may result in better drug delivery to the brain. They show a high ability to specifically recognize and bind to target areas via surface attached specific ligand, for example monoclonal antibodies, folate, transferrin (Tf) or antibodies against the transferrin receptor (TfR) [35,36].…”

“…This is based on the enhanced permeability and retention effect (EPR), which stems from the fact that the vasculature in pathological areas is "leaky", unlike in normal healthy tissue. The pore size in tumors varies from 100 to 780 nm and allows the spontaneous accumulation of nanomaterials in an interstitial tumor tissue [36,37].…”

“…These include different polymeric nanoparticles, liposomes, niosomes, solid lipid nanoparticles, nanocrystals, micelles, dendrimers, microcapsules, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles, carbon nano-platforms, and different nanoassemblies [36][37][38].…”

“…The ideally delivery system should be biodegradable, have small size and high loading capacity, minimum immunogenicity and be non-toxic, should not cause side effects, and demonstrate prolonged circulation in the body after administration, minimal self-aggregation tendency and should selectively accumulate in required area in therapeutic concentration with little or even no uptake by non-target cells [31,36].…”

“…The most widely used polymeric steric stabilizer is polyethylene glycol (PEG). It is a water-soluble polymer that exhibits protein resistance, low toxicity, non-immunogenicity and antigenicity and can be prepared synthetically with high purity and in large quantities which has led to their acceptance for clinical applications [7,31,36,37].…”