Stimuli-Responsive Peptides Advance Targeted Anticancer Drug Delivery by Exploiting Tumor-Specific Stimuli

Conventional chemotherapy often suffers from significant off-target toxicity, poor bioavailability, and adverse drug reactions, limiting its efficacy and patient tolerability. Efficient drug delivery systems are crucial to transport therapeutic agents specifically to tumor sites, enhance cellular uptake, and minimize systemic side effects. Peptides, with their inherent biocompatibility and structural versatility, have emerged as highly promising carriers. Their ability to be engineered for specific interactions makes them ideal candidates to address the delivery challenges in oncology.

This comprehensive review synthesizes recent advances in the development and application of stimuli-responsive peptide-based nanocarriers for anticancer therapy. The authors systematically examined various peptide-based delivery strategies, focusing on those designed to exploit tumor-specific stimuli for controlled drug release. The review highlights innovations in improving the pharmacokinetics and therapeutic outcomes of labile chemotherapeutics, discussing key challenges and future directions for clinical translation.

The review highlights significant progress in designing peptide nanocarriers that respond to specific tumor microenvironment cues, such as altered pH, elevated enzyme levels, or redox potential. These stimuli-responsive systems enable selective disassembly and precise drug release directly within cancer cells, thereby enhancing therapeutic efficacy while minimizing systemic exposure. The synthesized literature demonstrates that peptide-based carriers significantly improve the pharmacokinetics of chemotherapeutic agents, leading to enhanced cellular uptake and reduced off-target toxicity. The authors emphasize the critical role of peptide's intrinsic biocompatibility and structural tunability in achieving these desirable pharmaceutical properties.

The core finding is the field's advancement in leveraging tumor-specific stimuli to achieve highly selective drug release, a paradigm shift for targeted anticancer strategies.