Polymers for Cancer Therapy and Diagnostics

A special issue of Polymers (ISSN 2073-4360). This special issue belongs to the section "Biomacromolecules, Biobased and Biodegradable Polymers".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (5 August 2023) | Viewed by 3865

Special Issue Editor

Department of Bioengineering, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan
Interests: drug delivery system; biomaterial
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, polymers and polymeric materials have been gaining attention for application in the fields of cancer therapy and diagnostics. This Special Issue aims to develop the knowledge pertaining to the biomedical application of such polymers/materials from a broad perspective. We are searching for challenging studies that may discuss the design and synthesis of polymers, development and characterization of polymeric materials, elucidation of various in vivo phenomena such as blood circulation and biodistribution profiles, and elucidation of processes involved in cancer therapy and diagnostics. The papers published in this issue do not necessarily need to report novel polymeric materials, but should provide new insights into biomedical applications.

Dr. Yasutaka Anraku
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Polymers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • polymer
  • cancer therapy
  • cancer diagnostics
  • cancer imaging
  • drug delivery system

Published Papers (2 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

14 pages, 2344 KiB  
Article
Ligand Installation to Polymeric Micelles for Pediatric Brain Tumor Targeting
by Takayoshi Watanabe, Hayato Laurence Mizuno, Jumpei Norimatsu, Takumi Obara, Horacio Cabral, Kouhei Tsumoto, Makoto Nakakido, Daisuke Kawauchi and Yasutaka Anraku
Polymers 2023, 15(7), 1808; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym15071808 - 06 Apr 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1976
Abstract
Medulloblastoma is a life-threatening disease with poor therapeutic outcomes. In chemotherapy, low drug accumulation has been a cause of these outcomes. Such inadequate response to treatments has been associated with low drug accumulation, particularly with a limited cellular uptake of drugs. Recently, the [...] Read more.
Medulloblastoma is a life-threatening disease with poor therapeutic outcomes. In chemotherapy, low drug accumulation has been a cause of these outcomes. Such inadequate response to treatments has been associated with low drug accumulation, particularly with a limited cellular uptake of drugs. Recently, the conjugation of drugs to ligand molecules with high affinity to tumor cells has attracted much attention for enhancing drug internalization into target cells. Moreover, combining tumor-targeting ligands with nano-scaled drug carriers can potentially improve drug loading capacity and the versatility of the delivery. Herein, we focused on the possibility of targeting CD276/B7-H3, which is highly expressed on the medulloblastoma cell membrane, as a strategy for enhancing the cellular uptake of ligand-installed nanocarriers. Thus, anti-CD276 antibodies were conjugated on the surface of model nanocarriers based on polyion complex micelles (PIC/m) via click chemistry. The results showed that the anti-CD276 antibody-installed PIC/m improved intracellular delivery into CD276-expressing medulloblastoma cells in a CD276-dependent manner. Moreover, increasing the number of antibodies on the surface of micelles improved the cellular uptake efficiency. These observations indicate the potential of anti-CD276 antibody-installed nanocarriers for promoting drug delivery in medulloblastoma. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Polymers for Cancer Therapy and Diagnostics)
Show Figures

Figure 1

17 pages, 2479 KiB  
Article
Increased Enzyme Loading in PICsomes via Controlling Membrane Permeability Improves Enzyme Prodrug Cancer Therapy Outcome
by Akinori Goto, Yasutaka Anraku, Shigeto Fukushima and Akihiro Kishimura
Polymers 2023, 15(6), 1368; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym15061368 - 09 Mar 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1472
Abstract
Mesoscopic-sized polyion complex vesicles (PICsomes) with semi-permeable membranes are promising nanoreactors for enzyme prodrug therapy (EPT), mainly due to their ability to accommodate enzymes in their inner cavity. Increased loading efficacy and retained activity of enzymes in PICsomes are crucial for their practical [...] Read more.
Mesoscopic-sized polyion complex vesicles (PICsomes) with semi-permeable membranes are promising nanoreactors for enzyme prodrug therapy (EPT), mainly due to their ability to accommodate enzymes in their inner cavity. Increased loading efficacy and retained activity of enzymes in PICsomes are crucial for their practical application. Herein, a novel preparation method for enzyme-loaded PICsomes, the stepwise crosslinking (SWCL) method, was developed to achieve both high feed-to-loading enzyme efficiency and high enzymatic activity under in vivo conditions. Cytosine deaminase (CD), which catalyzes the conversion of the 5-fluorocytosine (5-FC) prodrug to cytotoxic 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), was loaded into PICsomes. The SWCL strategy enabled a substantial increase in CD encapsulation efficiency, up to ~44% of the feeding amount. CD-loaded PICsomes (CD@PICsomes) showed prolonged blood circulation to achieve appreciable tumor accumulation via enhanced permeability and retention effect. The combination of CD@PICsomes and 5-FC produced superior antitumor activity in a subcutaneous model of C26 murine colon adenocarcinoma, even at a lower dose than systemic 5-FU treatment, and showed significantly reduced adverse effects. These results reveal the feasibility of PICsome-based EPT as a novel, highly efficient, and safe cancer treatment modality. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Polymers for Cancer Therapy and Diagnostics)
Show Figures

Graphical abstract

Back to TopTop