Background

Cancer development is associated with abnormal, uncontrolled cell growth and causes significant economic and social burdens to society. The global statistics of different cancers have been increasing because of the aging population, and the increasing prevalence of risk factors such as stress condition, overweight, changing reproductive patterns, and smoking. The prognosis of cancer treatment is high, if diagnosed in the early stage. Late-stage diagnosis, however, is still a big challenge for the clinician. The usual treatment scheme involves chemotherapy and surgery followed by radiotherapy.

Scope of review

Chemotherapy is the most widely used therapeutic approach against cancer. However, it suffers from the major limitation of poor delivery of anticancer therapeutics to specific cancer-targeted tissues/cells.

Major conclusions

Nanomedicines, particularly nanostructured lipid carriers (NLCs) can improve the efficacy of encapsulated payload either through an active or passive targeting approach against different cancers. The targeted nanomedicine can be helpful in transporting drug carriers to the specifically tumor-targeted tissue/cells while sparing abstaining from the healthy tissue/cells. The active targeting utilizes the binding of a specific cancer ligand to the surface of the NLCs, which improves the therapeutic efficacy and safety of the cancer therapeutics.

General significance

This review shed light on the utilization of NLCs system for targeted therapy in different cancers. Furthermore, modification of NLCs as cancer theranostics is a recent advancement that is also discussed in the manuscript with a review of contemporary research carried out in this field.

中文翻译：

---

用于癌症靶向和治疗诊断应用的纳米结构脂质载体的设计进展

背景

癌症发展与异常、不受控制的细胞生长有关，并给社会造成重大的经济和社会负担。由于人口老龄化以及压力状况、超重、生殖模式改变和吸烟等风险因素的日益流行，不同癌症的全球统计数据一直在增加。如果在早期被诊断出来，癌症治疗的预后是很高的。然而，晚期诊断对临床医生来说仍然是一个巨大的挑战。通常的治疗方案包括化疗和手术，然后是放疗。

审查范围

化疗是最广泛使用的癌症治疗方法。然而，它的主要限制是抗癌治疗药物对特定癌症靶向组织/细胞的递送不佳。

主要结论

纳米药物，特别是纳米结构脂质载体 (NLC)，可以通过主动或被动靶向方法提高封装有效载荷的功效，以对抗不同的癌症。靶向纳米药物有助于将药物载体运输到特定的肿瘤靶向组织/细胞，同时避免远离健康组织/细胞。主动靶向利用特定癌症配体与 NLC 表面的结合，提高了癌症疗法的疗效和安全性。

一般意义

这篇综述阐明了 NLCs 系统在不同癌症靶向治疗中的应用。此外，将 NLC 修改为癌症治疗诊断学是最近的一项进展，手稿中也讨论了该进展，并对该领域进行的当代研究进行了回顾。