Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Sep 14, 2016; 22(34): 7718-7726
Published online Sep 14, 2016. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v22.i34.7718
Recent advances in orally administered cell-specific nanotherapeutics for inflammatory bowel disease
Xiao-Ying Si, Didier Merlin, Bo Xiao
Xiao-Ying Si, Bo Xiao, Institute for Clean Energy and Advanced Materials, Faculty of Materials and Energy, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China
Didier Merlin, Bo Xiao, Institute for Biomedical Sciences, Center for Diagnostics and Therapeutics, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30302, United States
Didier Merlin, Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Decatur, GA 30033, United States
Author contributions: All authors contributed equally to this work.
Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 51503172 and No. 81571807; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, No. SWU114086 and No. XDJK2015C067; and the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars (State Education Ministry), the Department of Veterans Affairs (Merit Award to Merlin D); the National Institutes of Health of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney, No. RO1-DK-071594; and Career Scientist Award from the Department of Veterans Affairs (to Merlin D).
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declared no conflict of interest related to this study.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Bo Xiao, PhD, Institute for Clean Energy and Advanced Materials, Faculty of Materials and Energy, Southwest University, Tiansheng Road No. 2, Chongqing 400715, China. hustboxiao@gmail.com
Telephone: +86-23-68254762 Fax: +86-23-68254969
Received: March 21, 2016
Peer-review started: March 22, 2016
First decision: May 12, 2016
Revised: July 11, 2016
Accepted: July 31, 2016
Article in press: August 1, 2016
Published online: September 14, 2016
Abstract

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic relapsing disease in gastrointestinal tract. Conventional medications lack the efficacy to offer complete remission in IBD therapy, and usually associate with serious side effects. Recent studies indicated that nanoparticle-based nanotherapeutics may offer precise and safe alternative to conventional medications via enhanced targeting, sustained drug release, and decreased adverse effects. Here, we reviewed orally cell-specific nanotherapeutics developed in recent years. In addition, the various obstacles for oral drug delivery are also reviewed in this manuscript. Orally administrated cell-specific nanotherapeutics is expected to become a novel therapeutic approach for IBD treatment.

Keywords: Oral administration, Nanotherapeutic, Cell-specificity, Inflammatory bowel disease

Core tip: Inflammatory bowel disease includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Nanotherapeutics may outperform conventional medications via the targeted drug delivery, sustained drug release, and decreased adverse effect. The main purpose of this review is to offer an update of efficacy of the orally administrated cell-specific nanotherapeutics that have been developed recently.