Due to the low therapeutic effect and severe side effect of systematic dosage regimen, the development of tumor-targeted therapeutics is crucial to the precision therapy of tumor. To deal with the problem, researchers developed hyaluronic acid-installed genomic nanocarriers (HA-NPs) to ablate the primary and metastatic tumors effectively by anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) approach, thus the active targeted modulation of tumor microenvironments are achieved. By a series of preparation, the anti-VEGF genomic loads can be strategically encapsulated in the well-defined synthetic nanocarriers, with high colloidal stability and and lower cell loading than the cationic gene carriers.
The effective intracellular gene delivery can be achieved by the internalization of HA-NPs and cancer cells, resulting in relatively high gene transfection efficacy. In addition, HA-NPs could demonstrate efficient extravasation, high accumulation and deep penetration in tumors which promotes tumor-targeted expression of anti-VEGF genomic loads for inhabitation of neo-vasculature, contributing to solid tumors ablation. Furthermore, the ligand-installed nanocarriers could facilitate systematic treatment of melanoma lung metastasis by the expressed anti-VEGF proteins widely distributed in blood circulation and metastatic niches to reduce the formation of neovasculature for tumorigenesis. To sum up, the anti-VEGF genomic nanocarriers are beneficial to the treatment of primary tumors and metastasis.