Marziyeh Fathi
1 
, Azam Safary
1,2 , Jaleh Barar
1,3* 1 Research Center for Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology, Biomedicine Institute, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran
2 Connective Tissue Diseases Research Center, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran
3 Department of Pharmaceutics, Faculty of Pharmacy, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran
Abstract
An important arena of the sophisticated nanosystems (NSs) is the combination of the responsive features of NSs with the biocatalytic properties of enzymes. The development of such smart drug delivery systems (DDSs) has seminal effectiveness in targeting, imaging, and monitoring of cancer. These NSs can exhibit site-specific delivery of the toxic cargo in response to the endogenous/exogenous stimuli. Enzyme responsive/targeted DDSs display enhanced accumulation of cargo molecules in the tumor microenvironment (TME) with a spatiotemporal controlled-release behavior. Based on the unique features of enzyme responsive/targeted DDSs, they offer incredible promise in overcoming some limitations of the currently used conventional DDSs. Taken all, targeting TME with the enzyme-responsive targeted DDSs may lead to versatile clinical outcomes in various malignancies.