Design and Functional Evaluation of Drug Delivery System Based on Dendritic Molecules and Gold Nanorods

概要

1. 1. Stimuli-triggered drug delivery system for cancer therapy
Cancer is a generic term for a large group of diseases characterized by the growth of abnormal
cells beyond their usual boundaries that can then invade surrounding parts of the body and/or spread
to other organs1. Statistics have shown that is the second leading cause of death and 9.6 million
people worldwide are estimated to have died from cancer in 2018. In Japan, the number of cancer
patients is considered to be increasing year by year regardless of gender as population aging2.
Currently, chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy are the most common methods for cancer
treatment3. Surgery is often highly invasive and causes bleeding at the surgical site and damage to
nearby organs4. Conventional chemotherapy also has disadvantages in the view point of
non-selective uptake of drugs in healthy and cancerous cells of tissues and organs 5,6. Although
radiotherapy, on the other hand, depends on the deposition of energy (irradiation with high-energy
gamma rays or X-rays (photons), or energetic beams of ions) which causes severe damage to cancer
cells leading to death or nutrition starvation of tumor cells, radiation is non-specific to cancer cells
due to the distribution to healthy tissue along the track of the photons in the both side of tumor7,8.
Thus, establishment of safe and effective cancer treatment method is urgent issue for improving
quality of life of cancer patients.
In order to overcome challenges of three therapies, drug delivery system (DDS), the technology
which exerts therapeutic effect of parent drug and minimalizes the adverse effects by temporally
and spatially controlling the in vivo drug biodistribution, have undergone diversification and
advancement in recent years. Since the concept of DDS was for the first time proposed in 1960s by
A. Zafforoni, a synthetic drug chemist and entrepreneur, foundations and results have been reported
about the nanoparticles (NPs)-based DDS based on nanogel, polymer micelle, polymer-drug
conjugate, liposome and so on9–13. ...

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