TY - JOUR
T1 - Recent advances on small-molecule nanomedicines for cancer treatment
AU - Xue, Xiangdong
AU - Lindstrom, Aaron
AU - Qu, Haijing
AU - Li, Yuanpei
PY - 2019/1/1
Y1 - 2019/1/1
N2 - Nanomedicines have made important contributions in the development of cancer therapies due to their tumor selectivity, multifunctionality, and synergistic effect between the payloads. In addition to the required pharmaceutical ingredients, nanomedicines are generally composed of nonpharmaceutical excipients. These excipients generally form a large proportion of the nanomedicine, and they may have potential toxicity and greatly increase the cost for drug development. Small molecule nanomedicines (SMNs) minimize or abandon the excipients and are directly assembled from pharmaceutical ingredients, which can largely improve the drug delivery efficiency and biosafety while also relieving the financial burden of drug development. In this review, we summarize recently developed SMNs that are composed of a single drug, physical mixtures of multiple drugs, drug–drug covalent conjugates, dyes with drugs, photosensitizers with drugs, photosensitizers with peptides, and drugs with peptides. This review focuses on the SMN's applications in cancer treatments, their limitations, and the future development outlook of SMNs. We hope that our insights on SMNs may be helpful to the future of drug development and make nanomedicine more powerful in the battle with cancer. This article is categorized under: Therapeutic Approaches and Drug Discovery > Nanomedicine for Oncologic Disease.
AB - Nanomedicines have made important contributions in the development of cancer therapies due to their tumor selectivity, multifunctionality, and synergistic effect between the payloads. In addition to the required pharmaceutical ingredients, nanomedicines are generally composed of nonpharmaceutical excipients. These excipients generally form a large proportion of the nanomedicine, and they may have potential toxicity and greatly increase the cost for drug development. Small molecule nanomedicines (SMNs) minimize or abandon the excipients and are directly assembled from pharmaceutical ingredients, which can largely improve the drug delivery efficiency and biosafety while also relieving the financial burden of drug development. In this review, we summarize recently developed SMNs that are composed of a single drug, physical mixtures of multiple drugs, drug–drug covalent conjugates, dyes with drugs, photosensitizers with drugs, photosensitizers with peptides, and drugs with peptides. This review focuses on the SMN's applications in cancer treatments, their limitations, and the future development outlook of SMNs. We hope that our insights on SMNs may be helpful to the future of drug development and make nanomedicine more powerful in the battle with cancer. This article is categorized under: Therapeutic Approaches and Drug Discovery > Nanomedicine for Oncologic Disease.
KW - cancer treatment
KW - nanomedicine
KW - self-assembly
KW - small molecules
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U2 - 10.1002/wnan.1607
DO - 10.1002/wnan.1607
M3 - Review article
C2 - 31840421
AN - SCOPUS:85076759637
JO - Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Nanomedicine and Nanobiotechnology
JF - Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Nanomedicine and Nanobiotechnology
SN - 1939-0041
M1 - e1607
ER -