The use of nanomedicine for cancer treatment takes advantage of its preferential accumulation in tumors owing to the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect. The development of cancer nanomedicine has promised highly effective treatment options unprecedented by standard therapeutics. However, the therapeutic efficacy of passively targeted nanomedicine is not always satisfactory because it is largely influenced by the heterogeneity of the intensity of the EPR effect exhibited within a tumor, at different stages of a tumor, and among individual tumors. In addition, limited data on EPR effectiveness in human hinders further clinical translation of nanomedicine. This unsatisfactory therapeutic outcome in mice and humans necessitates novel approaches to improve the EPR effect. This review focuses on current attempts at overcoming the limitations of traditional EPR-dependent nanomedicine by incorporating supplementary strategies, such as additional molecular targeting, physical alteration, or physiological remodeling of the tumor microenvironment. This review will provide valuable insight to researchers who seek to overcome the limitations of relying on the EPR effect alone in cancer nanomedicine and go "beyond the EPR effect".

Alliance with EPR Effect: Combined Strategies to Improve the EPR Effect in the Tumor Microenvironment.

Nanoparticles for modulating tumor microenvironment to improve drug delivery and tumor therapy.

Emerging Strategies for Developing Next-Generation Protein Therapeutics for Cancer Treatment

Parameters Affecting the Enhanced Permeability and Retention Effect: The Need for Patient Selection

A systematic review on Piper longum L.: Bridging traditional knowledge and pharmacological evidence for future translational research

Bacterial infections pose mounting public health concerns and cause an enormous medical and financial burden today. Rapid and sensitive detection of pathogenic bacteria at the point of care (POC) remains a paramount challenge. Here, we report a novel concept of bacteria-instructed click chemistry and employ it for POC microbial sensing. In this concept of bacteria-instructed click chemistry, we demonstrate for the first time that pathogenic bacteria can capture and reduce exogenous Cu2+ to Cu+ by leveraging their unique metabolic processes. The produced Cu+ subsequently acts as a catalyst to trigger the click reaction between gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) modified with azide and alkyne functional molecules, resulting in the aggregation of nanoparticles with a color change of the solution from red to blue. In this process, signal amplification from click chemistry is complied with the aggregation of functionalized AuNPs, thus presenting a robust colorimetric strategy for sensitive POC sensing of pathogenic bacteria. Notably, this colorimetric strategy is easily integrated in a smartphone app as a portable platform to achieve one-click detection in a mobile way. Moreover, with the help of the magnetic preseparation process, this smartphone app-assisted platform enables rapid (within 1 h) detection of Escherichia coli with high sensitivity (40 colony-forming units/mL) in the complex artificial sepsis blood samples, showing great potential for clinical early diagnosis of bacterial infections.

Bacteria-Instructed Click Chemistry between Functionalized Gold Nanoparticles for Point-of-Care Microbial Detection.

Enhancing chemotherapy delivery to tumors, improving tumor growth control, reducing metastasis, and increasing survival are all critical objectives of improved cancer therapy. One of the obstacles to the success of anticancer therapies is related to the inefficient distribution of drugs to tumor cells. To be effective, chemotherapeutics must reach a concentration in cancer cells that is sufficient to inhibit its targets. In the past years, the vascular normalization theory has gained widespread acceptance for explaining additional antitumor effects of inhibitors of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) signaling, when combined with chemotherapeutics. Vascular normalization is a strategy to enhance the antitumor effects of chemotherapeutics, but this is time and dose dependent and therefore difficult to implement clinically. Thus, alternative strategies that overcome these issues are needed. Accumulating scientific data demonstrate an alternative approach called "vascular promotion therapy" can increase chemotherapeutics delivery and intracellular uptake of the drug and reduces hypoxia by increasing tumor blood vessel density, blood flow, leakiness, and dilation, which leads to reduced cancer growth and metastasis. In this article, we first summarize the structural and functional abnormalities of the tumor microvasculature to highlight the importance of this phenomenon for chemotherapeutics distribution. Next, we summarize the limitations of anti-angiogenic strategy in cancer treatment, discuss some key prototypical underlying mechanisms of vascular normalization and initial clinical evidence of vascular promotion therapy, and speculate on the clinical potential of anticoagulation as a novel paradigm to improve cancer treatment.

Dong-Sheng Huang

Papers

Bacteria-Instructed Click Chemistry between Functionalized Gold Nanoparticles for Point-of-Care Microbial Detection.

Anti-angiogenesis or pro-angiogenesis for cancer treatment: focus on drug distribution.