Recent advances in developing polymeric micelles for treating cancer: Breakthroughs and bottlenecks in their clinical translation

Polymeric micelles (PMs) have been explored pre-clinically for the delivery of chemotherapeutics to treat cancer. Their unique features, such as easy surface functionalization, stimuli-responsiveness, good stability, ability to modify drug release, enhanced permeation and retention effect, and potential to encapsulate more than one type of therapeutic molecules at a time, make them unique carriers for the targeted delivery or for enhancing the bioavailability of chemotherapeutics.

Highlights

Non-specific release of cargos in cancer fails to produce an efficacious response.

The flexible chemistry of the copolymers used to produce micelles provide desirable properties.

Polymeric micelles (PMs) target cancer cells through passive and active targeting.

The functionalization and clinical application of PMs make them excellent nanocarriers for cancer therapy.

PMs loaded with paclitaxel and doxorubicin that are used to treat various types of cancer are available.

PMs can also be used as theranostic nanocarriers for the mapping of drug therapy along with tumor imaging in patients with cancer. This review focuses on the limitations of existing treatment strategies and on innovative approaches employed for the functionalization of PMs for targeting cancer cells. In addition, the bottlenecks associated with the translation of PMs from the laboratory to clinics are also discussed.

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Article information: Jaskiran Kaur, Monica Gulati, Niraj Kumar Jha, John Disouza, Vandana Patravale, Kamal Dua, Sachin Kumar Singh, Recent advances in developing polymeric micelles for treating cancer: Breakthroughs and bottlenecks in their clinical translation, Drug Discovery Today, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2022.02.005.