Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a prevalent disease worldwide, and patients at late stages of CRC often suffer from a high mortality rate after surgery. Adjuvant chemotherapeutics (ACs) have been extensively developed to improve the survival rate of such patients, but conventionally formulated ACs inevitably distribute toxic chemotherapeutic drugs to healthy organs and thus often trigger severe side effects. CRC cells may also develop drug resistance following repeat dosing of conventional ACs, limiting their effectiveness. Given these limitations, researchers have sought to use targeted drug delivery systems (DDSs), specifically the nanotechnology-based DDSs, to deliver the ACs. As lipid-based nanoplatforms have shown the potential to improve the efficacy and safety of various cytotoxic drugs (such as paclitaxel and vincristine) in the clinical treatment of gastric cancer and leukemia, the preclinical progress of lipid-based nanoplatforms has attracted increasing interest. The lipid-based nanoplatforms might be the most promising DDSs to succeed in entering a clinical trial for CRC treatment. This review will briefly examine the history of preclinical research on lipid-based nanoplatforms, summarize the current progress, and discuss the challenges and prospects of using such approaches in the treatment of CRC.
Keywords: colorectal cancer; exosomes; lipid-based nanoparticles; plant-derived lipid nanoparticles; targeted drug delivery.