Targeting strategies to improve cancer treatment

Tumors are one of the leading causes of death worldwide and the available treatments mainly consist of invasive surgery followed by radio- and chemo-therapy treatments before and after the operations. In particular chemotherapy uses drugs with low specificity that causes serious side effects in patients. Nanoparticles-based systems were widely employed for the encapsulation and passive delivery of drugs to tumors thanks to the presence of the EPR effect. Although these systems are widely accepted as antitumor drugs, there is a large variability in their effectiveness depending both on the tumor type and variability in patient physiology. Moreover, the simple intravenous administration of nanoparticles does not imply that nanostructures will eventually reach a specific body compartment due to the presence of barriers, such as the blood brain barrier (BBB), which selectively hampers the transport to the central nervous system. This lead to the development of targeted nanoparticles that involve the use of ligands with high affinity for a marker that is exclusively or preferentially expressed on the surface of the target cells. The identification of these markers is an active field in the oncology research and comprise several computational and biological methods. Here I will present my work on the identification of new targeting agents for safer delivery of drugs to different sites of interest and the combination of different approaches to reach this goal. These methods could improve nanoparticles delivery to specific tumors and push towards an ultimate therapy.

Fabio Taddei (9038) - fabio.taddei@nano.cnr.it
Stefan Heun (9472) - stefan.heun@nano.cnr.it