Development of multi-functionalized polymeric carriers for delivery of anticancer drug combinations

Abstract

Cancer is a major public health problem as one of the leading in causes of burden and causes of death diseases in global. However, most of current clinical therapies are not sufficient to cancer treatments due to the non-specific delivery of therapeutic agents to healthy cells and the less penetration of therapeutic agents into cancer cells. The objective of this work is to develop effective systems for anticancer drug delivery. Different systems have been developed for encapsulating of hydrophobic and hydrophilic drugs. Another strategy to reduce toxic side effects of chemotherapy is the treatment by combining different classes of chemotherapeutic drugs. Besides the reduction of side effects, enhancement in therapeutic efficacy can also be achieved at synergistic treatment combinations. Therefore, targeting delivery of combinations of two classes of anticancer drugs has been developed based on the optimized FOL/TAT-modified micellar systems to improve the treatment efficacy.