Polymer Nanoparticles for Cancer Photodynamic Therapy Combined with Nitric Oxide Photorelease and Chemotherapy

Abstract

Combination cancer therapies are emerging treatment modalities, which aim at exploiting additive/synergistic effects due to the simultaneous generation of multiple active species in the same region of space, with the final goal to maximize the therapeutic action and to minimize side effects. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a minimally invasive and clinically approved procedure for cancer treatment and its coupling with either conventional chemotherapeutics or unconventional anticancer agents like nitric oxide (NO) may open intriguing horizons towards new and still underexplored multimodal therapies. Engineered polymer nanoparticles (NPs) offer great potential in this respect since they permit to locate a large number of distinct components for therapy at target site without precluding their individual potential and to encourage the release of therapeutics in the same region of space resulting in an enhancement of the therapeutic outcome. We present here an overview of the most recent advances in polymeric NPs devised for bimodal cancer treatments based on the combination of PDT with either light-triggered NO release or chemotherapy, highlighting the logical design and their potential applications in cancer research.