Francesca Greco

Statistics show that one in three people develops cancer and one in four dies from it. It is clear that there is an urgent need to develop new therapeutics that are able to act more selectively on tumour cells. Polymer-anticancer drug conjugates are nano-sized medicines where anticancer drugs are covalently bound to a polymeric platform. Due to the hyperpermeability of tumour vasculature, they are able to accumulate preferentially in the tumour tissue (passive targeting).

>The linker between the drug and the polymer is designed to be cleaved following endocytic uptake by tumour cells. A number of polymer drug conjugates have now entered clinical evaluation and they are showing considerable promise.

Recently we have suggested the use of a single polymeric carrier to simultaneously deliver the combination of endocrine therapy and chemotherapy for the treatment of breast cancer. This conjugate was markedly more effective than the conjugates carrying individual drugs or their mixture.

My main interest is to elucidate the exact mechanism of action of these nano-sized constructs at cellular level.