Cancer is the second largest cause of death worldwide with the number of new cancer cases predicted to grow significantly in the next decades. Biotechnology and medicine can and should work hand-in-hand to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment efficacy. However, success has been frequently limited, in particular when treating late-stage solid tumors. There still is the need to develop smart and synergistic therapeutic approaches to achieve the synthesis of strong and effective drugs and delivery systems. Much interest has been paid to the development of smart drug delivery systems (drug-loaded particles) that utilize passive targeting, active targeting, and/or stimulus responsiveness strategies. This review will summarize some main ideas about the effect of each strategy and how the combination of some or all of them has shown to be effective. After a brief introduction of current cancer therapies and their limitations, we describe the biological barriers that nanoparticles need to overcome, followed by presenting different types of drug delivery systems to improve drug accumulation in tumors. Then, we describe cancer cell membrane targets that increase cellular drug uptake through active targeting mechanisms. Stimulus-responsive targeting is also discussed by looking at the intra- and extracellular conditions for specific drug release. We include a significant amount of information summarized in tables and figures on nanoparticle-based therapeutics, PEGylated drugs, different ligands for the design of active-targeted systems, and targeting of different organs. We also discuss some still prevailing fundamental limitations of these approaches, eg, by occlusion of targeting ligands.

One of the first methods to encapsulate drugs within polymer nanospheres was developed by Fessi and coworkers in 1989 and consisted of one-step nanoprecipitation based on solvent displacement. However, proteins are poorly encapsulated within polymer nanoparticles using this method because of their limited solubility in organic solvents. To overcome this limitation, we developed a two-step nanoprecipitation method and encapsulated various proteins with high efficiency into poly(lactic-co-glycolic)acid (PLGA) nanospheres (NP). In this method, a protein nanoprecipitation step is used first followed by a second polymer nanoprecipitation step. Two model enzymes, lysozyme and α-chymotrypsin, were used for the optimization of the method. We obtained encapsulation efficiencies of >70%, an amount of buffer-insoluble protein aggregates of typically 90%. The optimum conditions identified for lysozyme were used to successfully encapsulate cytochrome c(Cyt-c), an apoptosis-initiating basic protein of similar size, to verify reproducibility of the encapsulation procedure. The size of the Cyt-c loaded-PLGA nanospheres was around 300–400 nm indicating the potential of the delivery system to passively target tumors. Cell viability studies, using a human cervical cancer cell line (HeLa), demonstrate excellent biocompatibility of the PLGA nanoparticles. PLGA nanoparticles carrying encapsulated Cyt-c were not efficient in causing apoptosis presumably because PLGA nanoparticles are not efficiently taken up by the cells. Future systems will have to be optimized to ascertain efficient cellular uptake of the nanoparticles by, e.g., surface modification with receptor ligands.