Application of Different Stimuli-Responsive Polymeric Micelles for Drug Release

Abstract

Achieving controlled release of drugs in disease treatment can greatly improve the utilization rate and therapeutic effect of drugs. Therefore, the development of functional materials with controllable drug release has received more and more attention, such as stimuli-responsive polymeric micelles. The so-called stimuli-responsive polymeric micelles are a new type of polymer micelles that can be used to give responses to different stimulus conditions, such as endogenous stimuli (e.g. light, temperature, ultrasound intensity, magnetic field or electric field) and exogenous stimuli (e.g. redox potential, pH, or enzyme concentration). They can exhibit distinctive size and stability with the variations of the endogenous or exogenous environment. Stimuli-responsive polymeric micelles have several desirable biotechnology applications including their potential use as drug delivery vehicles because tumor tissue and normal tissue is different in physical and chemical properties, where they are very sensitive to endogenous or exogenous environmental changes. This research would mainly discuss different stimuli-responsive polymeric micelles for developing a diverse of drug delivery systems, including light and magnetism response, temperature and ultrasound response, redox response, pH response and enzyme response. Some recent advances and future directions would be briefly referred to as well.