Development and Application of Anticancer Nanomedicine

There is growing interest in integrating nanotechnology with medicine, creating the so-called nanomedicine for disease diagnosis and treatment with unprecedented precision and effi cacy [ 1 ] . Nanomedicines are drugor imaging agent-containing carriers or devices with size ranging from a few to several hundred nanometers [ 2 ] . Although the term nanomedicine emerged only recently [ 1, 3 ] , nanotechnology has been employed in drug delivery for decades [ 4 ] . In principle, nanomedicines are designed to enable the delivery of small molecules or macromolecular therapeutics to achieve improved disease treatment by circumventing various physiological barriers. The physiological barriers may prohibit the effi cient permeation of nanomedicines with undesired sizes and surface properties. Therefore, there have been signifi cant efforts on controlled formulation of nanomedicines. The majority of current nanotechnology platforms for chemotherapy have involved repackaging of traditional anticancer agents into various forms of nanometer-sized delivery vehicles, such as monomeric polymer–drug conjugates with sizes typically 10 nm or less [ 2 ] , polymeric nanoparticles [ 5 ] or self-assembled amphiphilic block-copolymer micelles [ 6 ] in a size range of 20–100 nm, or lipid [ 7 ] and polymeric vesicles [ 8 ] (also known as liposomes and polymersomes, respectively) with sizes between sub-100 nm to submicrometers. Liposomes are by far the most successful nanomedicine platform, accounting for 30–40% of nanomedicines that have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for their usage in the clinic [ 9 ] . The report of the fi rst liposomal drug delivery system dates back to the 1960s [ 5 ] . Long-circulating liposomes using so-called stealth technique appeared in the literature in the 1980s [ 10 ] .