Polymeric micelles as mighty nanocarriers for cancer gene therapy: a review

Gene therapy has shown extensive potential to treat human diseases occurring from the defection of genes like various types of cancers. The cationic polymers, as non-viral gene carriers, offer the ability to engineer carrier systems having customized features that can be adapted to suit any system. Upon polymeric micelle systems' core-shell structure, micelles can create the capacity to load genes/gene-drugs into the different micelle compartments, respectively.

The search will be managed in Pubmed, Medline, Cochrane library, Embase and Proquest for articles related to polymeric micelle-based gene delivery in order to cancer gene therapy using the accommodative search terms. A database of the first search of all search engines results will be made and repeated articles will be removed. After that, the related articles will be selected, and also the references of selected articles will be searched in order to find any other articles to complete the search database.

This study reviews kinds of polymeric nanomicelles, which have been used in gene therapy, critical parameters for micelle-based gene delivery, challenges and advantages/disadvantages as well as biosafety of nanomicelles in gene delivery systems. Furthermore, the discussion has focused on stimuli-responsive polymers and strategy and mechanisms regarding tumor-selective gene delivery.

This study provides an overview of the advantages/disadvantages of polymeric-based nanocarriers for cancer gene therapy.