therapeutic evaluation of polymeric nanomedicines: effect of different targeting peptides on therapeutic efficacy against breast cancer.

Targeted nanomedicines offer many advantages over macromolecular therapeutics that rely only on passive accumulation within the tumour environment. The aim of this work was to investigate the anticancer efficiency of polymeric nanomedicines that were conjugated with peptide aptamers that show high affinity for receptors on many cancer cells. In order to assess the ability for the nanomedicine to treat cancer and investigate how structure affected the behavior of the nanomedicine, three imaging modalities were utilized, including optical imaging, multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT) and confocal microscopy.