Hyaluronic acid prodrug micelles for tumour therapy

Abstract

Hyaluronic acid (HA), an important component of the extracellular matrix, has high water solubility and biocompatibility, and good application prospects in biomedicine. Especially in tumour treatment, prodrug polymer micelles prepared from HA and chemotherapeutics can increase water solubility, prolong drug release time, improve organ distribution and therapeutic effects, and show good tumour targeting and biocompatibility. Therefore, this study introduces strategies for using HA to prepare prodrug polymer micelles and discusses recent research on HA prodrug micelles for antitumor applications.

Keywords:

• Hyaluronic acid
• prodrug
• micelle
• tumour therapy
• antitumor

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Simon Partridge, PhD, from Liwen Bianji, Edanz Editing China (http://www.liwenbianji.cn/ac), for editing the English text of a draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competitive financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The authors sincerely acknowledge the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [21503035, 21606041, and 21776044], and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.