Dual/Multi-Responsive Delivery Nanoplatforms in Cancer Theranostics

Recent years have seen significant advancements in stimuli-responsive delivery platforms, which can react to the pathological and intrinsic physicochemical characteristics in affected areas to improve the precision of drug delivery. Chemotherapy has great challenges involving cytotoxicity, and it is still difficult to bypass this. Due to their promising distinguishing characteristics, stimuli-responsive drug delivery systems have transformed chemotherapy-based treatments, with the added advantages of improved bioavailability and cytotoxicity of cancer cells as compared to the traditional methods. Numerous platforms have been developed recently that respond physicochemically to both internal and external stimuli, including weak acidity, overexpressions of enzymes, reactive oxygen species and high concentration of glutathione. This system could react to stimuli inside cancer cells or in tumor microenvironments for controlled drug release; on-demand drug delivery and accumulation; and activation of bioactive compounds, probes and targeting ligands, among other things, overcoming multidrug resistance, enabling signaling, precise diagnostics, and precision therapy. The general approaches to creating stimuli-responsive platforms and recent developments are outlined in this chapter. We have also presented, along with their applications in drug delivery, tumor imaging, therapy and theranostics, as well as descriptions of stimuli-responsive immunotherapy.