Tumor-targeted drug delivery systems for anticancer therapies can selectively provide an appropriate cytotoxic payload to cancer cells, reducing the side effects of chemo.

Anticancer drugs aim to quickly divide and kill or destroy cells. Chemotherapy is effective, but it has the drawback of being unspecific. Other disadvantages of classical chemotherapy include inadequate drug therapy indices, evident toxicity, and increased risk of multidrug resistance (MDR) in long-term treatment. Furthermore, when these chemotherapy drugs are usually supplied, the dose may cause harm to many other critical organs in addition to healthy cells. Anticancer therapies are intensely interested in tumor-targeted drug delivery systems, since they not only boost the safety and efficacy of the drug, but also reduce the catastrophic side effects associated with chemotherapy. Such dynamically customized drug delivery devices can selectively provide an appropriate cytotoxic payload to cancer cells. They are beneficial in reducing some of the primary limitations of conventional medicines, such as bypassing biological barriers and overcoming drug resistance. Targeted medications limit harm to healthy cells while killing cancer cells. Because of their obvious benefits, customized medication delivery systems have taken their position in the drug delivery industry. Various ligands have grabbed researchers' attention in biological and therapeutic contexts and will continue to do so. FA-targeted delivery methods have already shown great effectiveness in preclinical models and considerable promise for future clinical applications. Because FR is overexpressed in a number of malignancies, FA must be employed as the preferred ligand to selectively target tumor cells and enjoy the benefits. Under in vitro, physiological and different storage circumstances, FA-(co)polymer and FA-drug conjugates were substantially more stable. To summarize, the major advantages of cancer targeting FA-nanoconjugates include selective internalization of nanoconjugates by cells (over) expressing FRs, simple conjugation chemistry, non-immunogenicity, and retention of nanoconjugate cargo in the endocytic vesicle after internalization rather than lysosomal processing as is the case with antibody.