Drug delivery articles within Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology

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  • Review Article |

    Immunotherapies have dramatically improved the outcomes of a subset of patients with advanced-stage cancers. Nonetheless, most patients will not respond to these agents and adverse events can be severe. In this Review, the authors describe the potential to address these challenges by combining immunotherapies with currently available thermal therapies as well as by using thermal immuno-nanomedicines.

    • Zhe Yang
    • , Di Gao
    •  & Xingcai Zhang

  • Review Article |

    Owing to several limitations, including elimination by the immune system and a lack of tumour specificity, systemically administered synthetic nanoparticles are used for a limited range of cancer indications. In this Review, the authors describe the potential of cellular nanoparticles (comprising a cell membrane coating around a synthetic core) to overcome these issues as well as their application in drug delivery, phototherapy and immunotherapy.

    • Ronnie H. Fang
    • , Weiwei Gao
    •  & Liangfang Zhang

  • Review Article |

    The blood–brain barrier regulates the movement of various substances between the blood and the brain and therefore has a crucial role in ensuring normal brain function. In both primary brain tumours and brain metastases, the blood–brain barrier is modified to the blood–tumour barrier (BTB), resulting in altered permeability; however, the BTB continues to restrict the penetration of many therapeutic agents into intracranial tumours. Here, Patricia Steeg describes the current knowledge of BTB structure and function and discusses how this knowledge can be translated into improvements in cancer therapy and patient outcomes.

    • Patricia S. Steeg

  • Perspective |

    An immunosuppressive tumour microenvironment is one of the main reasons why patients with solid tumours fail to respond to immune-checkpoint inhibition. In this Perspective, the authors describe the potential of nanomedicines to normalize the tumour microenvironment, thus overcoming this immunosuppressive barrier and enabling greater numbers of patients to respond to immune-checkpoint inhibition.

    • John D. Martin
    • , Horacio Cabral
    •  & Rakesh K. Jain

  • Comment |

    Scientific Advice meetings are a mechanism to improve communications between drug developers and regulators during the drug-development process. While standard practice for industry, the benefits provided by these meetings are under-utilised by academia. In the context of drug repurposing, can scientific advice, as part of a proposed new R&D tax credits scheme, help to unblock some of the obstacles in the way to clinical adoption?

    • Pan Pantziarka

  • Comment |

    In studies investigating the combination of two or more anticancer drugs that are already approved for independent use, or 'maintenance' regimens, the use of progression-free survival as the end point for approval is inadequate; sequential treatment with the same agents or existing salvage therapies, respectively, might provide an equivalent survival benefit, with lower toxicity, cost, and treatment burden, therefore, the use of an overall survival end point is essential to justify such interventions.

    • Bishal Gyawali
    •  & Vinay Prasad

  • Review Article |

    Intrinsic pathophysiological barriers limit the delivery of drugs to pancreatic cancers, contributing to the limited effectiveness of treatment. Nanomedicine approaches have the potential to overcome many of these drug-delivery challenges, and two nanoparticle therapies are now approved for the treatment of this disease. The authors discuss the key pathobiological barriers that must be overcome, the approaches to nanomedicine that have been pursued to date, and those that are the focus of ongoing research.

    • Pavan P. Adiseshaiah
    • , Rachael M. Crist
    •  & Scott E. McNeil

  • Review Article |

    Nanotechnology offers great promise for the detection, prevention and treatment of cancer. Current limitations of this technology include the heterogeneous distribution of nanoparticles to tumors, caused in part by the physiological barriers presented by the abnormal tumor vasculature and interstitial matrix. This Review discusses these barriers and summarizes strategies that have been developed to overcome them. It additionally examines design considerations for the optimization of delivery of nanoparticles to tumors.

    • Rakesh K. Jain
    •  & Triantafyllos Stylianopoulos

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