Conventional Nanosized Drug Delivery Systems for Cancer Applications

Recent progresses of biomedical nanotechnology increased the devel-opment of drug delivery systems (DDSs) for anticancer therapy. To im-prove clinical responses and tolerability, conventional nanocarriers (NCs) have been developed and evolved into smart DDSs with stimuli-responsive characteristics. Several clinical trials have shown that these DDSs have better clinical effects in the treatment of many cancers than those of free drugs. Furthermore, the use of molecules increased the specific targeting of therapeutic DDSs against cancer cells and tissues without affecting health tissues and limiting their toxicity versus unspe-cific body compartments. Herein, an extensive revision of literature of NCs as DDSs for cancer applications was performed by means of the bib-liographic database Scopus (Elsevier). Records were implemented by us-ing the bibliographic databases PubMed and Web Of Science (see gen-eral settings reported in the Section “Bibliographic database search”). The selection has been made manually by topic (title, abstract and key-words), without considering the impact of the selected papers (number of citation or IF/SJR of the Journal). Among the papers (articles, review) retrieved in the last 2 years (more than 523 papers, without duplicates), only appropriate findings involving the subject areas of pharmacology, (bio)chemistry, medicine and immunology are discussed. Older papers were included in the discussion just in case they were essential for the description of various topics. In cases where two or more papers discuss the same topic, the most recent, or the one containing more data, was considered.