Drug Targeting to Tumors: Principles, Pitfalls and (Pre-) Clinical Progress
Twan Lammers, Fabian Kießling, Wim E. Hennink, Gert Storm
Abstract
Routinely used systems include liposomes, polymers, micelles, nanoparticles and antibodies, and examples of strategies are passive drug targeting, active drug targeting to cancer cells, active drug targeting to endothelial cells and triggered drug delivery. Many different types of nanomedicines have been designed and evaluated for drug targeting to tumors. Comparable clinical observations have been made for polymers, micelles and nanoparticles. Collectively, the insights and advances convincingly demonstrate that nanometer-sized carrier materials hold significant potential for improving the efficacy of combined modality anticancer therapy. The sixth important issue to take into account with regard to establishing effective, broadly applicable and clinically relevant carrier materials relates to the fact that virtually all anticancer nanomedicines developed to date are designed to target solid tumors. An alternative strategy to improve the treatment of metastasis using nanomedicine formulations is based on locally confined delivery.