Emerging Strategies in Stimuli-Responsive Nanocarriers as the Drug Delivery System for Enhanced Cancer Therapy.

The conventional Drug Delivery System (DDS) has limitations such as leakage of the drug, toxicity to normal cells and loss of drug efficiency, while the stimuli-responsive DDS is non-toxic to cells, avoiding the leakage and degradation of the drug because of its targeted drug delivery to the pathological site. Thus nanomaterial chemistry enables - the development of smart stimuli-responsive DDS over the conventional DDS. Stimuliresponsive DDS ensures spatial or temporal, on-demand drug delivery to the targeted cancer cells. The DDS is engineered by using the organic (synthetic polymers, liposomes, peptides, aptamer, micelles, dendrimers) and inorganic (zinc oxide, gold, magnetic, quantum dots, metal oxides) materials. Principally, these nanocarriers release the drug at the targeted cells in response to external and internal stimuli such as temperature, light, ultrasound and magnetic field, pH value, redox potential (glutathione), and enzyme. The multi-stimuli responsive DDS is more promising than the single stimuli-responsive DDS in cancer therapy, and it extensively increases drug release and accumulation in the targeted cancer cells, resulting in better tumor cell ablation. In this regard, a handful of multi-stimuli responsive DDS is in clinical trials for further approval. A comprehensive review is crucial for addressing the existing knowledge about multi-stimuli responsive DDS, and hence, we summarized the emerging strategies in tailored ligand functionalized stimuli-responsive nanocarriers as the DDS for cancer therapies.

Antimicrobial, Anticancer Drug Carrying Properties of Biopolymers-based Nanocomposites- A Mini Review.

Biopolymers are ubiquitous in biomedical and healthcare application. Its nanocomposites have gained more attention as antimicrobials, a drug carrier, sensors, disease diagnosis, tissue engineering, wound healing, and cancer therapy. These biopolymer composites are efficient in holding, protecting and releasing bioactive drugs such as pharmaceutics, nutraceuticals, enzymes, and probiotics. Several studies revealed a polymer-based drug delivery system in cancer therapy and microbial treatments. However, this mini-review emphasized the source, extraction, and characterizations of the biopolymers and their use in the fabrication of various drug or metals based nanocomposites followed by its utilization as drug carrier or drug to treat the various diseases such as antimicrobial infections and cancer.