The development of anticancer therapies that involve natural drugs has undergone exponential growth in recent years. Among the natural compounds that produce beneficial effects on human health, polyphenols have shown potential therapeutic applications in cancer due to their protective functions in plants, their use as food additives, and their excellent antioxidant properties. The possibility of combining conventional drugs—which are usually more aggressive than natural compounds—with polyphenols offers very valuable advantages such as the building of more efficient anticancer therapies with less side effects on human health. This review shows a wide range of trials in which polyphenolic compounds play a crucial role as anticancer medicines alone or in combination with other drugs at different stages of cancer: cancer initiation, promotion, and growth or progression. Moreover, the future directions in applications of various polyphenols in cancer therapy are emphasized.

The current rapid advancement of numerous nanotechnology tools is being employed in treatment of many terminal diseases such as cancer. Nanocapsules (NCs) containing an anti-cancer drug offer a very promising alternative to conventional treatments, mostly due to their targeted delivery and precise action, and thereby they can be used in distinct applications: as biosensors or in medical imaging, allowing for cancer detection as well as agents/carriers in targeted drug delivery. The possibility of using different systems—inorganic nanoparticles, dendrimers, proteins, polymeric micelles, liposomes, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), quantum dots (QDs), biopolymeric nanoparticles and their combinations—offers multiple benefits to early cancer detection as well as controlled drug delivery to specific locations. This review focused on the key and recent progress in the encapsulation of anticancer drugs that include methods of preparation, drug loading and drug release mechanism on the presented nanosystems. Furthermore, the future directions in applications of various nanoparticles are highlighted.

A significant amount of academic and industrial research efforts are devoted to the encapsulation of active substances within micro- or nanocarriers. The ultimate goal of core–shell systems is the protection of the encapsulated substance from the environment, and its controlled and targeted release. This can be accomplished by employing “stimuli-responsive” materials as constituents of the capsule shell. Among a wide range of factors that induce the release of the core material, we focus herein on the light stimulus. In polymers, this feature can be achieved introducing a photo-sensitive segment, whose activation leads to either rupture or modification of the diffusive properties of the capsule shell, allowing the delivery of the encapsulated material. Micro- and nano-encapsulation techniques are constantly spreading towards wider application fields, and many different active molecules have been encapsulated, such as additives for food-packaging, pesticides, dyes, pharmaceutics, fragrances and flavors or cosmetics. Herein, a review on the latest and most challenging polymer-based micro- and nano-sized hollow carriers exhibiting a light-responsive release behavior is presented. A special focus is put on systems activated by wavelengths less harmful for living organisms (mainly in the ultraviolet, visible and infrared range), as well as on different preparation techniques, namely liposomes, self-assembly, layer-by-layer, and interfacial polymerization.