مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تحویل هدفمند دارو در درمان سرطان – Sage 2005

Abstract

Chemotherapy has been the main modality of treatment for cancer patients; however, its success rate remains low, primarily due to limited accessibility of drugs to the tumor tissue, their intolerable toxicity, development of multi-drug resistance, and the dynamic heterogeneous biology of the growing tumors. Better understanding of tumor biology in recent years and new targeted drug delivery approaches that are being explored using different nanosystems and bioconjugates provide optimism in developing successful cancer therapy. This article reviews the possibilities and challenges for targeted drug delivery in cancer therapy.

Introduction

Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death in most parts of the world (1). Early prognosis of the disease due to regular screening and better understanding of the pathophysiology of tumor progression has opened many new vistas as therapy options. In most solid tumors, after its surgical removal, the remaining cancer cells are managed with a variety of treatment options including, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, et cetera (2). However, once the cancer is metastasized, the treatment options are limited, and chemotherapy remains the choice of treatment. The main reason for failure of chemotherapy is the poor accessibility of antineoplastic agents to the tumor, requiring higher doses, and the nonselective nature of these agents causes severe toxicity (3). Thus, targeted drug delivery holds immense potential to improve the treatment of cancer by selectively providing therapeutically effective drug concentrations at the tumor site. This review is an attempt to present an overview of the problems related to targeted drug delivery in cancer, and to provide an insight into the issues related to the development of targeted drug delivery systems for cancer.