This invited editorial article aims at reporting progress about the enhanced permeability and retention effect (EPR for short), starting from a recent Special Issue in the Journal of Personalized Medicine (namely, “EPR Effect-Based Tumor Target...
Chemotherapy for human solid tumors in clinical practice is far from satisfactory. Despite the discovery and synthesis of hundreds of thousands of anticancer compounds targeting various crucial units in cancer cell proliferation and metabolism, the f...
Polymer-drug conjugates have demonstrated clinical potential in the context of anticancer therapy. However, such promising results have, to date, failed to translate into a marketed product. Polymer-drug conjugates rely on two factors for activity: (...
The enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect in cancer treatment is one of the key mechanisms that enables drug accumulation at the tumor site. However, despite a plethora of virus/inorganic/organic-based nanocarriers designed to rely on the...
This Special Issue on the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect commemorates the 35th anniversary of its discovery, the original 1986 Matsumura and Maeda finding being published in Cancer Research as a new concept in cancer chemotherapy. M...
Most pediatric cancers are highly chemo-sensitive, and cytotoxic chemotherapy has always been the mainstay of treatment. Anthracyclines are highly effective against most types of childhood cancer, such as neuroblastoma, hepatoblastoma, nephroblastoma...
The principle of enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect has been used to design anti-cancer nanomedicines over decades. However, it is being challenged due to the poor clinical outcome of nanoparticles and controversial physiological founda...
Magnetic nanoparticles have gained attention in cancer therapy due to their non-toxic properties and high bio-compatibility. In this report, we synthesize a dual-responsive magnetic nanoparticle (MNP) that is sensitive to subtle pH and temperature ch...
Targeted nanotheranostic systems offer significant benefits due to the integration of diagnostic and therapeutic functionality, promoting personalized medicine. In recent years, prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) has emerged as an ideal theran...
Conventional cancer chemotherapy presents notable drug side effects due to non-selective action of the chemotherapeutics to normal cells. Nanoparticles decorated with receptor-specific ligands on the surface have shown an important role in improving...
With the growing interest in the use of nanoparticles (NPs) in nanomedicine, there is a crucial need for imaging and targeted therapies to determine NP distribution in the body after systemic administration, and to achieve strong accumulation in tumo...
Cancer cells have characteristics of acquired and intrinsic resistances to chemotherapy treatment—due to the hostile tumor microenvironment—that create a significant challenge for effective therapeutic regimens. Multidrug resistance, collateral toxic...
The use of nanomedicine for antitumor therapy has been extensively investigated for a long time. Enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect-mediated drug delivery is currently regarded as an effective way to bring drugs to tumors, especially ma...
The enhanced permeability and retention effect (EPR effect) is a crucial phenomenon for understanding the pathophysiological characteristics of blood vasculature and microenvironments in solid tumors. It is also an essential concept for designing ant...
Surgical resection is the gold standard for the treatment of many kinds of tumor, but its success depends on the early diagnosis and the absence of metastases. However, many deep-seated tumors (liver, pancreas, for example) are often unresectable at...
The innovative development of nanomedicine has promised effective treatment options compared to the standard therapeutics for cancer therapy. However, the efficiency of EPR-targeted nanodrugs is not always pleasing as it is strongly prejudiced by the...
Passive targeting is the foremost mechanism by which nanocarriers and drug-bearing macromolecules deliver their payload selectively to solid tumors. An important driver of passive targeting is the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect, whi...
Over the past few decades, the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect of nanomedicine has been a crucial phenomenon in targeted cancer therapy. Specifically, understanding the EPR effect has been a significant aspect of delivering anticance...
One obstacle to the successful delivery of nanodrugs into solid tumors is the heterogeneity of an enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect as a result of occluded or embolized tumor blood vessels. Therefore, the augmentation of the EPR effect...
In 1979, development of the first polymer drug SMANCS [styrene-co-maleic acid (SMA) copolymer conjugated to neocarzinostatin (NCS)] by Maeda and colleagues was a breakthrough in the cancer field. When SMANCS was administered to mice, drug accumulatio...
For more than three decades, enhanced permeability and retention (EPR)-effect-based nanomedicines have received considerable attention for tumor-selective treatment of solid tumors. However, treatment of advanced cancers remains a huge challenge in c...
The Enhanced Permeability and Retention (EPR) effect is a key mechanism for passive tumor targeting, which involves the selective accumulation of therapeutic nanoparticles in tumors due to their unique vascular characteristics. While previous reviews...
Chemotherapy has an essential role not only in advanced solid tumor therapy intervention but also in society’s health at large. Chemoresistance, however, seriously restricts the efficiency and sensitivity of chemotherapeutic agents, representin...
Starting with the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect discovery, nanomedicine has gained a crucial role in cancer treatment. The advances in the field have led to the approval of nanodrugs with improved safety profile and still inspire t...
Innumerable people worldwide die of cancer every year, although pharmaceutical therapy has actualized many benefits in human health. For background, anti-cancer drug development is difficult due to the multifactorial pathogenesis and complicated path...
Enhanced permeation retention (EPR) was a significant milestone discovery by Maeda et al. paving the path for the emerging field of nanomedicine to become a powerful tool in the fight against cancer. Sildenafil is a potent inhibitor of phosphodiester...
The field of nanotechnology has exploded in recent years with diverse arrays of applications. Cancer therapeutics have recently seen benefit from nanotechnology with the approval of some early nanoscale drug delivery systems. A diversity of novel del...
Metal oxide nanoparticles (MONPs) have recently attracted much attention from researchers due to their use in cancer chemotherapy, targeted drug delivery, and diagnosis/MRI imaging. Various studies have demonstrated that different metal oxide NPs sho...
A design strategy for macromolecular prodrugs is described, that are expected to exhibit robust activity against most solid tumor types while resulting in minimal toxicities to normal tissues. This approach exploits the enhanced permeability, and ret...
Tremendous progress has been made in the field of nanomedicine for cancer treatment. However, most of the research to date has been focused on inhibiting primary tumor growth with comparatively less efforts directed towards managing tumor metastasis....
Boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) is a cancer treatment with clinically demonstrated efficacy using boronophenylalanine (BPA) and sodium mercaptododecaborate (BSH). However, tumor tissue selectivity of BSH and retention of BPA in tumor cells is a...
Targeted drug delivery is a precise and effective strategy in oncotherapy that can accurately deliver drugs to tumor cells or tissues to enhance their therapeutic effect and, meanwhile, weaken their undesirable side effects on normal cells or tissues...
In the present work, we pioneered a coordinated self-assembly approach aimed at fabricating carrier-free hybrid nanoparticles to address the inherent challenges of the anaerobic microenvironment and the oxidative resistance induced by reductive gluta...
Pancreatic cancer is notorious for its dismal prognosis. The enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect theory posits that nanomedicines (therapeutics in the size range of approximately 10–200 nm) selectively accumulate in tumors. Nanomed...
Nanoparticle carriers offer the possibility of enhanced delivery of therapeutic payloads in tumor tissues due to tumor-selective accumulation through the enhanced permeability and retention effect (EPR). Gold nanoparticles (AuNP), in particular, poss...
Theranostic nanoparticles recently received great interest for uniting unique functions to amplify therapeutic efficacy and reduce side effects. Despite the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect, which amplifies the accumulation of nanopar...
Antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), as a next generation of antibody therapeutics, is a combination of an antibody and a drug connected via a specialized linker. ADC has four action steps: systemic circulation, the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR...
Water-soluble nanomedicines have been widely studied for the targeted delivery of drugs for a very long time. As a notable example, biomaterials based on N-(2-hydroxypropyl) methacrylamide (HPMA) copolymers have been under investigation for nearly ha...
In recent years, the near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence theranostic system has garnered increasing attention for its advantages in the simultaneous diagnosis- and imaging-guided delivery of therapeutic drugs. However, challenges such as strong backgrou...
The rapamycin analog, ridaforolimus, has demonstrated potent anti-proliferative effects in cancer treatment, and it currently is being evaluated in a range of clinical cancer studies. Ridaforolimus is an extremely lipophilic compound with limited aqu...
Drug nanocrystals, which are comprised of active pharmaceutical ingredients and only a small amount of essential stabilizers, have the ability to improve the solubility, dissolution and bioavailability of poorly water-soluble drugs; in turn, drug nan...
Lung cancer (LC) is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths, responsible for approximately 18.4% of all cancer mortalities in both sexes combined. The use of systemic therapeutics remains one of the primary treatments for LC. However, the therapeu...
Cancer is a global health concern. Various therapeutic approaches, including chemotherapy, photodynamic therapy, and immunotherapy, have been developed for cancer treatment. Silica nanoparticles, quantum dots, and metal–organic framework (MOF)-...
The concept of nanomedicine has evolved significantly in recent decades, leveraging the unique phenomenon known as the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect. This has facilitated major advancements in targeted drug delivery, imaging, and i...
In recent years, chemo-photodynamic combinational therapy has become increasingly popular in treating breast cancer. However, the limited accumulation of nanodrugs into tumors (less than 1% of the injected dose) impacts therapeutic efficacy to an ext...
Methylene blue (MB) is a widely used dye and photodynamic therapy (PDT) agent that can produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) after light exposure, triggering apoptosis. However, it is hard for the dye to penetrate through the cell membrane, leading t...
Poly-lactic-co-glycolic acid nanoparticles (PLGA-NPs) were approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for drug delivery in cancer. The enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect drives their accumulation minimizing the side effects of c...
Current primary liver cancer therapies, including sorafenib and transarterial chemoembolization, face significant limitations due to chemoresistance caused by impaired drug uptake, altered metabolism, and other genetic modulations. These challenges c...
Since their first discovery in the 1960s by Alec Bangham, liposomes have been shown to be effective drug delivery systems for treating various cancers. Several liposome-based formulations received approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FD...
Because chemotherapeutic drugs are often associated with serious side effects, the central topic in modern drug delivery is maximizing the localization of drugs at the target while minimizing non-specific drug interactions at unwanted regions. To add...
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