Stimulus-responsive vesicular polymer nano-integrators for drug and gene delivery

Abstract

Over the past two decades, nano-sized biosystems have increasingly been utilized to deliver various pharmaceutical agents to a specific region, organ or tissue for controllable precision therapy. Whether solid nanohydrogel, nanosphere, nanoparticle, nanosheet, micelles and lipoproteins, or “hollow” nanobubble, liposome, nanocapsule, and nanovesicle, all of them can exhibit outstanding loading and releasing capability as a drug vehicle – in particular polymeric nanovesicle, a microscopic hollow sphere that encloses a water core with a thin polymer membrane. Besides excellent stability, toughness and liposome-like compatibility, polymeric nanovesicles offer considerable scope for tailoring properties by changing their chemical structure, block lengths, stimulus-responsiveness and even conjugation with biomolecules. In this review, we summarize the latest advances in stimulus-responsive polymeric nanovesicles for biomedical applications. Different functionalized polymers are in development to construct more complex multiple responsive nanovesicles in delivery systems, medical imaging, biosensors and so on.

Keywords:

• nanovesicle
• stimulus-responsive
• amphiphilic block copolymer
• self-assembled
• drug delivery

Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51773069), Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Information Materials and Technology (Grant No. 2017B030301007), MOE International Laboratory for Optical Information Technologies and the 111 Project.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.