Nanodelivery Systems as a Novel Strategy to Overcome Treatment Failure of Cancer

Abstract

Despite the tremendous progress in cancer treatment in recent decades, cancers often become resistant due to multiple mechanisms, such as intrinsic or acquired multidrug resistance, which leads to unsatisfactory treatment effects or accompanying metastasis and recurrence, ultimately to treatment failure. With a deeper understanding of the molecular mechanisms of tumors, researchers have realized that treatment designs targeting tumor resistance mechanisms would be a promising strategy to break the therapeutic deadlock. Nanodelivery systems have excellent physicochemical properties, including highly efficient tissue-specific delivery, substantial specific surface area, and controllable surface chemistry, which endow nanodelivery systems with capabilities such as precise targeting, deep penetration, responsive drug release, multidrug codelivery, and multimodal synergy, which are currently widely used in biomedical researches and bring a new dawn for overcoming cancer resistance. Based on the mechanisms of tumor therapeutic resistance, this review summarizes the research progress of nanodelivery systems for overcoming tumor resistance to improve therapeutic efficacy in recent years and offers prospects and challenges of the application of nanodelivery systems for overcoming cancer resistance.

Keywords: cancer resistance; immunotherapy; nanodelivery systems; therapeutics; tumor microenvironment.