Application of Liposome-Based Drug Delivery Systems in Tumor Treatment

At present, chemotherapy is still the main method to treat tumors in clinic, but it has its own defects, including severe side effects to normal tissues, the tendency to develop drug resistance and poor targeting, which lead to unsatisfactory treatment outcomes. To enhance the efficacy and targeting of anti-tumor drugs, various drug delivery systems based on nanotechnology have emerged in recent years, which can effectively deliver anti-tumor drugs to tumor tissues through retention and permeability effects. Despite their considerable advantages in tumor treatment, these delivery systems also have certain limitations, such as unclear metabolic pathways and challenges in industrial production. Among them, liposomes, as a type of nanocarriers composed of phospholipids and cholesterol, not only possess a bilayer vesicle structure similar to biological membranes that provides good encapsulation capacity for both hydrophilic and lipophilic drugs, but also exhibit excellent biocompatibility and can mimic cell membranes biological properties. Thus, liposomes based drug delivery system have been widely applied in the field of tumor diagnosis and treatment. Especially, a series of environment-responsive liposomal drug delivery system have been developed based on specific tumor microenvironments. These systems can not only regulate the tumor microenvironment to achieve the cascade effect in tumor treatment, but also explore various synergistic treatment strategies, improving tumor treatment efficacy while reducing toxicity to the body. Based on this, this paper reviews and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of liposomes as drug delivery system in tumor diagnosis and treatment and provides proposals for enhancing the biosafety of liposomes and promoting their clinical translation.