Cocrystal@protein-anchoring nanococktail for combinatorially treating multidrug-resistant cancer

Nano-formulations in disease therapy: designs, advances, challenges, and future directions

Nano-formulations, as an innovative drug delivery system, offer distinct advantages in enhancing drug administration methods, improving bioavailability, promoting biodegradability, and enabling targeted delivery. By exploiting the unique size advantages of nano-formulations, therapeutic agents, including drugs, genes, and proteins, can be precisely reorganized at the microscale level. This modification not only facilitates the precise release of these agents but also significantly enhances their efficacy while minimizing adverse effects, thereby creating novel opportunities for treatment of a wide range of diseases. In this review, we discuss recent advancements, challenges, and future perspectives in nano-formulations for therapeutic applications. For this aim, we firstly introduce the development, design, synthesis, and action mechanisms of nano-formulations. Then, we summarize their applications in disease diagnosis and treatment, especially in fields of oncology, pulmonology, cardiology, endocrinology, dermatology, and ophthalmology. Furthermore, we address the challenges associated with the medical applications of nanomaterials, and provide an outlook on future directions based on these considerations. This review offers a comprehensive examination of the current applications and potential significance of nano-formulations in disease diagnosis and treatment, thereby contributing to the advancement of modern medical therapies.

Innovative Nanomedicine Delivery: Targeting Tumor Microenvironment to Defeat Drug Resistance

Nanodrug delivery systems have revolutionized tumor therapy like never before. By overcoming the complexity of the tumor microenvironment (TME) and bypassing drug resistance mechanisms, nanotechnology has shown great potential to improve drug efficacy and reduce toxic side effects. This review examines the impact of the TME on drug resistance and recent advances in nanomedicine delivery systems to overcome this challenge. Characteristics of the TME such as hypoxia, acidity, and high interstitial pressure significantly reduce the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, leading to increased drug resistance in tumor cells. Then, this review summarizes innovative nanocarrier designs for these microenvironmental features, including hypoxia-sensitive nanoparticles, pH-responsive carriers, and multifunctional nanosystems that enable targeted drug release and improved drug penetration and accumulation in tumors. By combining nanotechnology with therapeutic strategies, this review offers a novel perspective by focusing on the innovative design of nanocarriers that interact with the TME, a dimension often overlooked in similar reviews. We highlight the dual role of these nanocarriers in therapeutic delivery and TME modulation, emphasize their potential to overcome drug resistance, and look at future research directions.