Cancer targeting strategies in nanomedicine: Design and application of chitosan nanoparticles

Nanomedicine has recently emerged as an efficient way of overcoming various limitations of conventional medicine, such as a lack of selectivity, poor pharmacokinetics and undesirable side effects. Especially, nanoparticles (NPs) technology has attracted more attentions in nanomedicine based approaches for cancer therapy due to unique physicochemical properties. Although NPs have been intensively studied for tumor targeting and showed some promising results, there is still limited understanding about pharmacokinetic (PK) and pharmacodynamic (PD) properties and tumor targeting efficiency of NPs. Thus, advances in understanding of these issues in NPs technology can create more opportunities to translate nanomedicine approaches into improved clinical outcomes. The goal of this review is to understand the key factors that are required for tumor targeted delivery of NPs. In addition, the review article more specifically describes important considerations in the formulation of chitosan nanoparticles such as particle size, shape, stiffness and deformability.