Advanced targeted nanomedicine

Abstract

Targeted drug delivery has been the major topic in drug formulation and delivery. As nanomedicine emerges to create nano scale therapeutics and diagnostics, it is still essential to embed targeting capability to these novel systems to make them useful. Here we discuss various targeting approaches for delivery of therapeutic and diagnostic nano materials in view of search for more universal methods to target diseased tissues. Many diseases are accompanied with hypoxia and acidosis. Coating nanoparticles with pH Low Insertion Peptides (pHLIPs) increases efficiency of targeting acidic diseased tissues. It has been showing promising results to create future nanotheranostics for cancer and other diseases which are dominating in the present world.

Keywords: Active targeting; Environmental targeting; Nanomedicine; Passive targeting; Tissue acidity; pHLIP.

Fig.1

Different applications of pHLIP for targeting of acidic tissues. Tethering of cargo molecules to the surface of cells (a). Cytoplasmic delivery of cargo molecules and it's release by break of cleavable link (shown in blue) (b). Assembly of multifunctional pHLIP-coated liposomes containing polar (green) and hydrophobic (yellow) payloads (c). Schematic presentation of interactions of lipid bilayer of the pHLIP-coated multifunctional liposomes with plasma membrane of a cell (presentation of liposome in the endosome is schematic and not in a scale) (d).