Advances and Applications of Nanoparticles in Cancer Therapy

Prof. Changyang Gong’s team (Department of Biotherapy, Cancer Center and State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy, West China Hospital, Sichuan University) constructs this review, in which Dr. Xianzhou Huang leads most of the jobs. Rapid growth in nanoparticles as delivery systems holds vast promise to promote therapeutic approaches for cancer treatment.

Presently, a diverse array of nanoparticles with unique properties have been developed. These nanoparticles applied in cancer therapy includes but not limited to micelles, liposomes, polymeric nanoparticles, dendrimer nanoparticles, polymersomes, protein nanoparticles, inorganic nanoparticles, exosomes, biomimetic nanoparticles, molecularly imprinted nanoparticles, and hybrid nanoparticles.

However, as complicated as cancer themselves, there always are different obstacles in treating this disease. Fortunately, nanoparticles have been developed to overcome different challenges and to achieve sophisticated delivery routes for enhancement of a series of therapies (see the image below). These strategies guarantee the delivery and function of loaded drugs. Thanks to the versatility and modifiability of nanotechnology, they can enable the cargoes the long-circulation time, targeting abilities and responsive to pH, redox, GSH, enzymes, hypoxia, ATP, temperature, and ions, even secure the cargoes to their destined subcellar localizations.

Such powerful nanotechnologies have been widely applied in the treatment of cancers. Inspiring advances have been achieved in the field of cancer therapy using nanoparticles. The applications are not limited in the single therapies, such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy, phototherapy, immunotherapy and gene therapy, but also in the combination therapies. A good example is a cooperative Nano-CRISPR scaffold (Nano-CD). As shown in the image below, Nano-CD co-delivered cisplatin and CRISPR/dCas9 plasmid for GSDME protein production, selectively inducing strong pyroptosis in tumor cells by activating the caspase-3 pathway and the expression of GSDME.

In summary, we are rapidly acquiring a much deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities of a diverse of nanoparticles for cancer therapy. This review has presented the up-to-date progression of nanoparticles for addressing these challenges and alternatively creating more and novel opportunities. We expect that these successions and unremitting efforts of researchers in the field will further promote nanoparticles to shift the paradigm of cancer therapy, and make nanoparticles associated cancer treatments as common clinical approaches of cancer therapy true in the foreseeable future.