Therapeutic and diagnostic applications of electrospun nanofibers in cancer research- A review

Cancer is among the leading cause of death worldwide. Current cancer therapy, such as chemotherapy, surgery and radiation therapy have limitations. Moreover, anticancer drugs and therapeutic agent perform badly due to their systemic impact on normal and healthy tissues. With progress in nanotechnology, electrospun nanofibers have been widely employed in biomedical and pharmaceutical fields, such as cell isolation and staining, drug carriers, nano-antibacterial agents, therapies and diagnosis for cancer. Nanofibers with high specific surface, high loading capacity and high encapsulation efficiency can facilitate the solubility of the drug into the aqueous solution and improve the efficiency of the drug. Moreover, the drug release profile can be tuning by polymer degradation and functionalization. Different delivery systems based on the polymeric nanofibers such as PCL, PVA/Chitosan, PLA containing different anticancer drug including SN-38 and Doxorubicin have been investigated. In some cases, to overcome the limitation of single drug loaded nanofiber including initial burst release, functionalization of nanofibers was also reported. Beside the therapeutic applications, electrospun nanofiber can be applied as biosensors in early cancer detection. There are several reports on the application of nanofibrous substrates as biosensor in cancer detection such asmultiwalled carbon nanotube doped nylon 6/poly (thionine) nanofiber as electrochemical biosensor, WO3- PdCl2 nanofiber as gas sensor, dendritic zinc porphyrin (Den-Por(Zn)) nanofibrous as floeresent chemosensor and epidermal growth factor conjugated mesoporous zinc oxide (ZnO) nanofibers as immunosensors. Biomimetic structure and large surface area of electrospun nanofibers providelarge number of cell contact sites and active surface groups for conjugation of various targeting molecules, which make nanofibers an ideal platform in isolation and detection of circulating tumor cells for cell capture. Various targeting molecules have been conjugated onto the surface of the nanofibers, such as epithelial cell adhesion molecule antibody (anti-EpCAM), anti-CD146, folic acid (FA), DNA aptamers, and etc. In this review, application of electrospun nanofibers in anticancer drug delivery, diagnostics and cell capture for cancer treatment was discussed

Keywords:

Electrospun nanofibers , Drug delivery , Cancer therapy , Cancer detection