A review of polysaccharide cytotoxic drug conjugates for cancer therapy

The most considerable challenges facing effective cancer therapy are systemic toxicity of cytotoxic drugs, their lack of tumor localizing and an even distribution throughout the whole body. Besides, short half-lives and undesirable pharmacokinetics are among the other drawbacks that inhibit effective cancer chemotherapy. Conjugation of low molecular weight drugs to polysaccharides has been used as a way to address these problems. This review will focus on polysaccharide drug conjugates and will provide an overview on various conjugation studies which have been accomplished for these carriers with cytotoxic drugs. Although a wide variety of anticancer agents including some toxins have been the subject of conjugation techniques, in this review, low molecular weight cytotoxic drugs conjugated covalently to the carriers are considered. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.