Biologically based strategies for overcoming in vivo barriers with functional nano-delivery systems.

Nanomedicine has been developed to reduce or eliminate the side effects and toxicity upon systemic therapy of chemotherapeutic agents and to improve their therapeutic efficacy. However, the translation of non-sized or nano-encapsulated drugs is hampered by the low penetration and accumulation of engineered nanoparticles (NPs) in sites of tumors as well as their poor pharmacokinetics. This may be due to the synthetic structure of NPs and also complicated and unknown characteristics of the solid tumor microenvironment (TME).