Department of Pharmaceutics and Medicinal Chemistry, Thomas J. Long School of Pharmacy, 751 Brookside Road, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA, United States
*For Correspondence -bjasti@pacific.edu
Cancer is a pathological condition characterized by uncontrolled proliferation of cells that invade surrounding tissue and metastasize to new sites in the body. This disease is difficult to treat since cancer cells, unlike bacteria or virus, do not contain molecular targets completely foreign to the body. The goal of any therapy is to treat the affected tissue with minimal damage to normal tissues. With the current cancer therapies, this is often difficult to achieve as the drugs are cytotoxic in nature and often causes widespread damage to normal tissues as well. Thus, a need for targeted therapy for cancer has evolved in recent times. This review details a novel targeted micellar drug delivery approach that involves targeting of drugs and drug delivery systems to cancer cells that specifically expresses folate receptors on the cell surface. This review describes the synthetic design approach, and the ability of folate labeled amphiphilic systemto formmicelles which can be used as targeted drug carriers to cancer tissues.
Cancer, Chemotherpy, Radiation Phagocytosis
