Abstract
Cancer is a major threat to human health; thus, drug and therapeutic strategy development are imminent. With a deep understanding of cancer, many promising strategies have been challenged. Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are a hot target for cancer treatment, especially in combination with traditional chemotherapeutics. However, the lack of tumor selectivity greatly hampers the effect and applicability of those drugs. Namely, the CSC therapeutic and conventional chemotherapeutic drugs are mostly small molecular drugs, therefore, distributed indiscriminately in the body. As a result of the indiscriminate distribution, the therapeutics also arrest the growth of normal cells and induce severe side effects. CSC therapeutics can more seriously exert the side effects if normal stem cells get affected. In this context, enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect-based nanomedicines offer advantages to overcome this problem. Briefly, due to the unique characteristics of tumor vasculature, nanomedicines selectively accumulate in tumor tissue avoiding normal tissues, resulting in negligible side effects and exhibit profound tumor selectivity. However, challenges do exist in the development of nanomedicine. The major factor impeding the EPR effect is the heterogeneity of tumor blood vessels, especially in human cancers. Thus, it is necessary to find out how to overcome heterogeneity and further enhance the EPR effect. Also, the improper design of nanomedicine critically affects the therapeutic effect. In this chapter, we discussed the principle of the EPR effect focusing on the strategies to augment the EPR effect and provided the critical scenarios for designing nanomedicines.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Cancer stem cells: basic concept and therapeutic implications |
Editors | Farhadul Islam, Alfred K. Lam |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 221-235 |
ISBN (Print) | 9789819931842, 9789819931859 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 27 Jul 2023 |