Nanofibers in Glioma Therapy: Advances, Applications, and Overcoming Challenges

Shangjun Zhou,1,2,* Mingcheng Zhang,3,* Jiayu Wang,2 Xi Chen,2 Zhijie Xu,4 Yuanliang Yan,2,5 Yong Li1 1Department of Pediatric Surgery, Hunan Children’s Hospital, Changsha, Hunan, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Pharmacy, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, People’s Republic of China; 3Center of Endoscopy, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Shandong First Medical University Tai’an, Shandong, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Pathology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, People’s Republic of China; 5National Clinical Research Center for Geriatric Disorders, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Yuanliang Yan, Department of Pharmacy, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, People’s Republic of China, Email [email protected] Yong Li, Department of Pediatric Surgery, Hunan Children’s Hospital, Changsha, Hunan, People’s Republic of China, Email [email protected]: Despite relentless effort to study glioma treatment, the prognosis for glioma patients remains poor. The main obstacles include the high rate of recurrence and the difficulty of passing the blood-brain barrier (BBB) for therapeutic drugs. Nanomaterials owing to their special physicochemical properties have been used in a wide range of fields thus far. The nanodrug delivery system (NDDS) with the ability of crossing the BBB, targeting glioma site, maintaining drug stability and controlling drug release, has significantly enhanced the anti-tumor therapeutic effect, improving the prognosis of glioma patients. Aligned nanofibers (NFs) are ideal materials to establish in vitro models of glioma microenvironment (GME), enabling the exploration of the mechanism of glioma cell migration and invasion to discover novel therapeutic targets. Moreover, NFs are now widely used in glioma applications such as radiotherapy, phototherapy, thermotherapy and immunotherapy. Despite the absolute dominance of NFs in anti-glioma applications, there are still some problems such as the further optimization of NDDS, and the impact of interactions between nanofibers and the protein corona (PC) on glioma therapy. This paper will shed light on the latest glioma applications of NFs in drug delivery systems and mimicking the tumor microenvironment (TME), and discuss how to further optimize the NDDS and eliminate or utilize the nanomedicine-PC interactions. Keywords: nanofibers, glioma, tumor microenvironment, drug delivery systems, nanomedicine