Drug Delivery Through Multifunctional Polypeptidic Hydrogels.

Over the last two decades, remarkable progress has been made to the discovery of novel drugs as well as their delivery systems for the treatment of cancer, the major challenge in medicine. Pharmaceutical scientists are trying to shift from traditional to novel drug delivery systems by applying nanotechnology and, in particular, polymeric carriers to medicine. In complex diseases, very sophisticated nanocarriers should be designed to encapsulate a significant quantity of drugs and bypass biological barriers with minimum cargo loss to effectively and directly deliver the encapsulated drug to the desired pathological site.