Bio-Inspired, Biomimetic Polymeric Cancer Nanotherapeutics

Advances in nanotechnology over the last few decades have vastly improved the effectiveness of cancer drug delivery compared to conventional systemic therapies, which suffer from poor bioavailability, short-half life, and toxicity. However, current nanoparticles based cancer drug delivery approaches lack the precision, and reciprocal communication with the tumor tissue microenvironment to carry out effective therapeutic delivery. Hence, its essential to improve the current nanotechnological approaches to overcome the existing limitations via novel approaches and methods. Recently, several studies have emulated nature's principles to develop novel nanocarriers for treating cancer. Nature's living organisms have evolved with time, to have the most sophisticated and intricate structure, design, and function that are hard to recreate. Biological carriers and systems posses extremely smart design, structure and function that out perform synthetic drug carriers in many ways. They have unique shape, size, surface properties, and functionalities to carry out the required tasks with high precision. Mimicking the physicochemical properties of the natural carriers, cellular functions, and the dynamic tumor tissue microenvironment, would offer novel cancer nanotherapeutics with advanced functionalities. In addition, a detailed understanding of the cancer biology, and the changes in the physiological processes during cancer progression could further help in developing highly effective biomimetic nanocarriers with self-programmable and tumor microenvironment responsive properties. Here in this review, we summarize recent efforts on the development of biologically inspired biomimetic nanoparticle carriers for cancer therapy. In particular biomimetic polymeric nanotherapeutics inspired from natural carriers, pathogens, cellular trafficking and communication, and tumor microenvironment are discussed in detail.