Lipid/Polymer Nanoparticles as Tools to Improve the Therapeutic Activity of Existing and Emerging Anticancer Drug Combinations

Cancer is a complex disease and virtually all chemotherapy regimens for treating cancer utilize drug combinations selected to affect several targets that contribute to cancer cell survival and disease progression. Although drug combinations are the standard of care for patients with advanced cancer, new anticancer drugs are typically first introduced in patients as single agents and only after many years of clinical trials are these single agents combined with other drugs to determine their optimal role in cancer treatment. This process needs to change if patients are going to receive the full benefit of the arsenal of approved cytotoxic/cytostatic agents and emerging molecularly targeted therapeutics. It is clear that drug delivery systems will play an important role in the development and use of drug combinations for the treatment of cancer and the objective of this discussion is to highlight how existing and emerging drug carriers can be used as an enabling technology to create fixed ratio anticancer drug combination products for the treatment of systemic disease.