Current Drug Delivery - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2011

Conventional radiotherapy and chemotherapy have been applied to treatments after surgery or advanced/metastatic cancers. However, the applications have been limited, partly due to non-specificity that results in toxic side effects and to the eventual multi-drug resistance (MDR) that results from prolonged treatments. Considerable interest has been placed on receptor-targeted cancer therapy following the developm Read More

Somatostatin receptors (SSTRs), especially SSTR subtype 2, are found expressed at relatively higher levels in many tumor cells and in tumoral blood vessels relative to normal tissues. This creates an opportunity for developing various cytotoxic SST conjugates that selectively target SSTR2-specific sites. Accordingly, some potent chemotherapeutic agents such as camptothecin (CPT), methotrexate (MTX), paclitaxel (PTX) an Read More

Specific receptors for luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LH-RH), somatostatin, bombesin, and other peptides are found on various cancers. We review the development of cytotoxic analogs of LH-RH, somatostatin, and bombesin/gastrin releasing peptide (GRP) designed for targeting chemotherapy to peptide receptors on various cancers. Cytotoxic analogs of LH-RH, AN-152 and AN-207, containing doxorubicin (DOX) Read More

Radioimmunotherapy of solid tumors remains a challenge despite the tremendous success of 90Y ibritumomab tiuxetan (Zevalin) and 131I Tositumomab (Bexxar) in treating non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. For a variety of reasons, clinical trials of radiolabeled antibodies against solid tumors have not led to responses equivalent to those seen against lymphoma. In contrast, promising responses have been observed with unlab Read More

Receptor-mediated tumor targeting has received major attention in the field of cancer drug delivery in the past few years. Receptors, as molecular target has opened new opportunities for cellular or intracellular targeting of drug loaded delivery systems conjugated with targeting moieties i.e. ligand. This receptor mediated targeting of cancer drug through nano carrier systems to cancerous tissue offer protection and improves Read More

The ability of Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide (SPIO) nanoparticles and Poly(Propyleneimine) generation 5 dendrimers (PPI G5) to cooperatively provoke siRNA complexation was investigated in order to develop a targeted, multifunctional siRNA delivery system for cancer therapy. Poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) coating and cancer specific targeting moiety (LHRH peptide) have been incorporated into SPIO-PPI G5-siRNA Read More

ImmunoPET is a non-invasive imaging technology based on tracking and quantification of radiolabeled monoclonal antibodies, antibody fragments and peptides in vivo. The knowledge of distribution and expression levels of a given receptor is a key for successful receptor targeted cancer therapy. ImmunoPET performed with probes with high affinity and specificity to a given receptor aspires to be a method for obtaining co Read More

The three mammalian bombesin (Bn) receptors (gastrin-releasing peptide [GRP] receptor, neuromedin B [NMB] receptor, BRS-3) are one of the classes of G protein-coupled receptors that are most frequently overexpress/ ectopically expressed by common, important malignancies. Because of the clinical success of somatostatin receptor- mediated imaging and cytotoxicity with neuroendocrine tumors, there is now increasing Read More

Vascular-targeting antiangiogenic therapy (VTAT) of cancer can be advantageous over conventional tumor cell targeted cancer therapy if an appropriate target is found. Our hypothesis is that endoglin (ENG; CD105) is an excellent target in VTAT. ENG is selectively expressed on vascular and lymphatic endothelium in tumors. This allows us to target both tumor-associated vasculature and lymphatic vessels to suppress tum Read More