1,721,162 research outputs found
Zinc oxide nanoparticles from drug delivery to immunomodulation: progress and challenges
No full textIntroduction: Over the last decades, zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) have emerged as promising
nanoplatforms for various biomedical applications. This critical perspective summarizes the main uses
of ZnO NPs in cancer therapy, focusing on their roles in advanced drug delivery, stimuli-responsive
systems, and immunomodulatory treatments targeting tumor tissues.
Areas covered: Due to their intrinsic physicochemical properties, ZnO NPs can dissolve in the acidic
tumor microenvironment and generate radical oxygen species, causing metabolic dysregulations that
lead to cancer cell apoptosis. When engineered into multimodal nanoplatforms, the combination of
ZnO with standard cancer therapies, such as chemotherapy and immunotherapy, or with energyactivated treatments like photodynamic and sonodynamic therapy, achieves synergistic antitumor
effects, overcoming many limitations of current standards of care.
Expert opinion: Crucially, ZnO demonstrates a strong immunomodulatory capability, promoting T-cell
activation and dendritic cell maturation necessary to reverse the ‘cold’ tumor microenvironment often
associated with solid and deep-seated tumors. Overall, ZnO NPs offer revolutionary therapeutic prospects for novel anticancer treatments, provided that challenges regarding long-term stability and
controlled degradability are addressed in future works for clinical translation
The World Big Challenges Faced by Nanoscience: Examples of How Integrated Science Can Save the World
No full textOur world has plenty of challenges, concerns, as well as human and environmental problems. One cannot solve most of them, but constructive human cooperation is essential. Science and engineering can also contribute, applying a broad and multidisciplinary approach. Nanotechnology deals with the creation and manipulation of matter on a scale ranging from 1 to 100 nm. This science field that emerged in the late’50 s has revolutionized the comprehension of matter and opened the door to a plethora of novel, unprecedented, and intriguing applications and solutions to current problems. This chapter aims to overview the most urgent world challenges of our era, potentially solved by employing nanotechnologies. The idea is to trace a direction to which all from scientists, professionals, and experts, to industrial people, policymakers, young people, and students can recognize with their professionality and create a common conscience and integrity on where we are and where we are going. Some of the most urgent problems of our modern world can be solved by employing nanotechnologies and all related nanomaterials involving sciences
Natural and artificial phospholipid bilayer coatings on solid-state nanoparticles, current and future perspectives
Full text linkIn recent years, much research attention has been applied to the development and clinical application of lipid-based nanomedicines, such as the use of liposomes for drug delivery, of lipid nanoparticles for gene delivery, for example in COVID-19 vaccines, and of cell-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs)
Bio-degradation study of colloidal mesoporous silica nanoparticles: Effect of surface functionalization with organo-silanes and poly(ethylene glycol)
No full textExosome-Enhanced Sonodynamic Therapy in Cancer: Emerging Synergies and Modulation of the Tumor Microenvironment
Full text linkThe development of safer, more effective, and tumor-specific therapeutic strategies remains a major challenge in oncology. Conventional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy often cause severe side effects and are limited in their ability to target deep-seated or resistant tumors. In this context, sonodynamic therapy (SDT) has emerged as a promising, non-invasive option, harnessing low-intensity ultrasound to activate sonosensitizers deep within tissues and generate cytotoxic reactive oxygen species (ROS) that selectively induce cancer cell death. Interestingly, SDT can also be combined with other therapies to achieve synergistic effects. However, despite encouraging preclinical results, SDT clinical translation is hindered by the poor aqueous solubility, instability, and low tumor specificity of traditional sonosensitizers. To overcome these limitations, recent studies have focused on employing extracellular vesicles (EVs), especially exosomes, as natural, biomimetic nanocarriers for sonosensitizer delivery. EVs offer unique advantages, including high biocompatibility, low immunogenicity, and intrinsic tumor-targeting ability, which make them ideal platforms for improving the therapeutic precision of SDT. Although several delivery strategies have been proposed, a comprehensive and focused overview of approaches specifically designed to enhance SDT performance using EVs is currently lacking. This review summarizes recent advances in integrating EVs with SDT for cancer treatment. It discusses the mechanisms underlying SDT, the engineering strategies developed to enhance exosome functionality, and the synergistic effects achieved through this combination. Furthermore, this review emphasizes that EV-based SDT not only enhances tumor accumulation of the therapeutic nanoplatforms, but also actively remodels the tumor microenvironment by improving oxygen availability, reversing immunosuppressive conditions, and triggering durable antitumor responses. Finally, the review addresses the translational challenges and outlines the critical future directions required to advance this promising therapeutic approach toward clinical application
Multimodal Decorations of Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles for Improved Cancer Therapy
Full text linkThe presence of leaky vasculature and the lack of lymphatic drainage of small structures by the solid tumors formulate nanoparticles as promising delivery vehicles in cancer therapy. In particular, among various nanoparticles, the mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSN) exhibit numerous outstanding features, including mechanical thermal and chemical stability, huge surface area and ordered porous interior to store different anti-cancer therapeutics with high loading capacity and tunable release mechanisms. Furthermore, one can easily decorate the surface of MSN by attaching ligands for active targeting specifically to the cancer region exploiting overexpressed receptors. The controlled release of drugs to the disease site without any leakage to healthy tissues can be achieved by employing environment responsive gatekeepers for the end-capping of MSN. To achieve precise cancer chemotherapy, the most desired delivery system should possess high loading efficiency, site-specificity and capacity of controlled release. In this review we will focus on multimodal decorations of MSN, which is the most demanding ongoing approach related to MSN application in cancer therapy. Herein, we will report about the recently tried efforts for multimodal modifications of MSN, exploiting both the active targeting and stimuli responsive behavior simultaneously, along with individual targeted delivery and stimuli responsive cancer therapy using MSN
- …
