Title:The Use of Anthracyclines for Therapy of CNS Tumors
Volume: 15
Issue: 6
Author(s): Martina da Ros, Anna Lisa Iorio, Maurizio Lucchesi, Alessia Stival, Maurizio de Martino and Iacopo Sardi
Affiliation:
Keywords:
Anthracyclines, blood brain barrier, brain diseases, drug delivery systems, drug efflux proteins, multidrug resistance.
Abstract: Despite being long lived, anthracyclines remain the “evergreen” drugs in clinical practice of oncology,
showing a potent effect in inhibiting cell growth in many types of tumors, including brain neoplasms.
Unfortunately, they suffer from a poor penetration into the brain when intravenously administered due to multidrug
resistance mechanism, which hampers their delivery across the blood brain barrier.
In this paper, we summarize the current literature on the role of anthracyclines in cancer therapy and highlight
recent efforts on 1) development of tumor cell resistance to anthracyclines and 2) the new approaches to brain drug
delivery across the blood brain barrier.
