Abstract
Ideal cancer therapy without side effects would be achieved by drug carriers, which can deliver anticancer drugsspecifically to cancer cells in tumor tissue. Thus, it is necessary to control both the biodistribution and cellularuptake of drug carriers. For this, physicochemical properties, especially surface charge of drug carriers, are impor-tant. Negative charge of carriers is favorable to avoid interaction with biogenic substances, which results in effectivebiodistribution. In contrast, positive charge is required for effective cellular uptake. Therefore, conversion of the car-rier surface charge from negative to positive in response to tumor microenvironment is expected to cause effectivedelivery of drugs to target cells. In this article, we introduce novel charge–invertible nanoparticles responding tumormicroenvironment.
