What is it about?
This open-access review paper describes various types of liposome nanoparticles that have been used to encapsulate chemotherapy drugs, enabling them to target cancer cells.
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Why is it important?
Cancer is a life-threatening disease contributing to ~3.4 million deaths annually worldwide. The main clinical failure of chemotherapy drugs is that they are administered systemically (all around the body) and a low concentration is delivered to the target cancer site. Increasing the dose only exposes normal cells to the cytotoxic drug causing harmful side effects. Encapsulation of anti-cancer drugs within nanoparticles is a powerful method of making targeted delivery of the therapeutic agent to the cancer cells. Liposomes are a type of nanoparticle that are particularly easy to produce, to functionalise and can be made small enough to take drugs across the blood-brain-barrier, which prevents many potential drugs from reaching the brain to treat brain tumours.
Perspectives
This paper is open access from the Journal webpage.
Dr James R Smith
University of Portsmouth
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Liposomal Drug Delivery Systems and Anticancer Drugs, Molecules, April 2018, MDPI AG,
DOI: 10.3390/molecules23040907.
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