Harnessing albumin as a carrier for cancer therapies

Serum albumin, a natural ligand carrier that is highly concentrated and long-circulating in the blood, has shown remarkable promise as a carrier for anti-cancer agents. Albumin is able to prolong the circulation half-life of otherwise rapidly cleared drugs and, importantly, promote their accumulation within tumors. The applications for using albumin as a cancer drug carrier are broad and include both traditional cancer chemotherapeutics and new classes of biologics. Strategies for leveraging albumin for drug delivery can be classified broadly into exogenous and in situ binding formulations that utilize covalent attachment, non-covalent association, or encapsulation in albumin-based nanoparticles. These methods have shown remarkable preclinical and clinical successes that are examined in this review.