Therapeutic Nanoparticles for Drug Delivery in Cancer

Dear Colleagues,

In the last decade, therapeutic nanoparticles have gained increasing interest in many fields of medicine. These vectors have been proven to offer novel diagnostic and therapeutic applications for drug delivery against cancer, due to their unique chemical−physical properties, such as size, surface characteristics and interaction with biomolecules. The high surface/volume ratio and surface bioreactivity make nanoparticles ideal multifunctional platform carriers for selective tumor targeting and treatment. Many authors have recently contributed to improve the active targeting of drug-loaded nanocarriers to boost anticancer activity, but the results are often limited to in vitro models.

Despite the progress made to augment their stability, biocompatibility and cell uptake, and to make these functionalized vectors able to overcome some cancer-related drug resistances, the real clinical potential of these molecules has yet to be fully defined.

Many issues still remain to be addressed in the definition of their pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics, therapeutic index, side effects and toxicology. In addition to the large number of nanoparticles obtained with different material types and functionalization, significant preclinical studies to support their introduction in clinical practice are still needed.

Nanotechnologies represent a very promising field for applications in multimodal cancer therapy and diagnostics, also because of the wide range of materials that can be adopted for their assembling. The bibliography describes the properties of many different nanoparticles, such as phospholipid-based liposomes, dendrimers, polymeric micelles, extracellular and exome vesicles, gold, iron and hydroxyapatite nanovectors, just to name a few. The specific properties of each of them seem to offer important insights also for the delivery of the new generation of drugs that include single-stranded DNA, small interfering RNA (siRNA), therapeutic agents for gene-targeting RNA interference (RNAi) and anticancer vaccines.

Furthermore, while much of the focus has been posed on the preparation and definitions of nanoparticles’ chemical and physical properties, tumor microenvironment biology has gained some consideration for increasing nanoparticle targeting and the release of antiproliferative agents. This dynamic network, where cancer cells and several immune cells interact with each other, modulating tumorigenesis and metastatic development, might represent an ideal niche for nanoparticles’ selective activity.

This Special Issue intends to focus on the versatility of nanoparticles by expanding the knowledge on how the peculiar biology and chemistry of cancer tissues can be used for their selective targeting and for engineering novel nanovectors.

Dr. Donato Colangelo
Dr. Stelvio Tonello
Guest Editors

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• tumor microenvironment
• tumor targeting
• nanoparticles
• nanovectors
• drug delivery
• nanoparticle pharmacokinetics
• pharmacodynamics
• antisense delivery
• small interfering RNA (siRNA) delivery
• mRNA-based drugs
• vaccine delivery