Recent trends in targeted anticancer prodrug and conjugate design

Area of Science:

• Oncology
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Drug Delivery

Background:

• Anticancer drugs often cause significant toxicity to healthy cells due to their nonselective antiproliferative nature.
• Drug resistance in solid tumors and off-target toxicities are major limitations in current cancer chemotherapy, leading to poor patient prognosis.
• Prodrug and conjugate strategies aim to enhance the efficacy and safety of anticancer agents.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review recent advancements in prodrug and conjugate design for cancer treatment.
• To critically analyze various targeting strategies for selective drug delivery to tumors.
• To present a comparative account of the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches.

Main Methods:

• Review of recent literature on prodrug and conjugate design in cancer therapy.
• Analysis of targeting strategies exploiting tumor-specific characteristics (e.g., pH, enzymes, hypoxia, antigens).
• Comparative evaluation of different prodrug and conjugate approaches.

Main Results:

• Targeted prodrug and conjugate design focuses on selective delivery of anticancer agents to tumor tissues.
• Strategies leverage tumor microenvironment features like low pH, elevated enzymes, hypoxia, and tumor-specific antigens.
• Classical prodrug design addressed physicochemical and biopharmaceutical challenges, while newer designs focus on tumor targeting.

Conclusions:

• Targeted prodrug and conjugate design offers a promising strategy to improve cancer treatment by enhancing drug selectivity and reducing systemic toxicity.
• Exploiting tumor-specific characteristics enables more effective and safer delivery of anticancer agents.
• Continued research in this area is crucial for developing next-generation cancer therapies.