A comprehensive review on lipid nanocarrier systems for cancer treatment: fabrication, future prospects and clinical trials

Abstract

Over the last few decades, cancer has been considered a clinical challenge, being among the leading causes of mortality all over the world. Although many treatment approaches have been developed for cancer, chemotherapy is still the most utilized in the clinical setting. However, the available chemotherapeutics-based treatments have several caveats including their lack of specificity, adverse effects as well as cancer relapse and metastasis which mainly explains the low survival rate of patients. Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) have been utilized as promising nanocarrier systems for chemotherapeutics to overcome the challenges of the currently applied therapeutic strategies for cancer treatment. Loading chemotherapeutic agent(s) into LNPs improves drug delivery at different aspects including specific targeting of tumours, and enhancing the bioavailability of drugs at the tumour site through selective release of their payload, thus reducing their undesired side effects on healthy cells. This review article delineates an overview of the clinical challenges in many cancer treatments as well as depicts the role of LNPs in achieving optimal therapeutic outcomes. Moreover, the review contains a comprehensive description of the many LNPs categories used as nanocarriers in cancer treatment to date, as well as the potential of LNPs for future applications in other areas of medicine and research.

Keywords:

• Lipid nanoparticles
• lipid nanovesicles
• solid lipid nanoparticles
• nanostructured lipid carriers
• cubosomes
• lipid nanocapsules
• emulsomes
• nanoemulsions
• cancer
• clinical trials

Acknowledgements

The corresponding author (principal investigator) and the authors would like to thank the Science, Technology and Innovation Funding Authority (STDF), Egypt (GERF - 33687 and STDF FLUG Call 1 - Project ID 46715), and the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT), Egypt (JESOR-Fund) for funding a couple of our research projects relevant to cancer treatment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The funding associated with the work featured in this article was provided by the Science, Technology and Innovation Funding Authority (STDF), Egypt (GERF - 33687 and STDF FLUG Call 1 - Project ID 46715), and by the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT), Egypt (Project: JESOR-Fund).