Polymer: Lipid Hybrid Nanostructures in Cancer Drug Delivery: Successes and Limitations
Nanotechnology is a smarter way to apply a multimodal approach in biomedical science, especially in the therapeutic, targeting, and imaging areas. Among the various nanoplatforms, polymeric and lipid based nanostructures have been of considerable interest to drug delivery formulators due to the complementary functional advantages of both lipids and polymers. These multifunctional, hybrid architectures possess better attributes for drug delivery such as high loading capacity, improved stability, ease of anchoring ligands, surface manipulation, tuneable drug release, loading multiple therapeutics, and excellent in vivo performance. Nanostructures comprised of hybrid materials are poised to emerge as a new avenue in the delivery of various therapeutics including complex diseases like cancer. Polymer lipid hybrid (PLH) nanostructures can be of various types such as polymer core lipid shell, core shell type hollow lipid polymer nanoparticulates, monolithic lipid polymer hybrid nanoparticulates, and polymer caged liposomes. The main focus of this chapter is to provide an overview of PLH nanostructures and their current state for cancer drug delivery.