Wu Linfeng, Li Xiaoxun, Janagam Dileep R, Lowe Tao L
Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, Tennessee, 38163, USA.
Pharm Res. 2014 Mar;31(3):531-40. doi: 10.1007/s11095-013-1196-z. Epub 2013 Aug 31.
Pediatric brain tumors are most common cancers in childhood and among the leading causes of death in children. Chemotherapy has been used as adjuvant (i.e. after) or neoadjuvant (i.e. before) therapy to surgery and radiotherapy for the management of pediatric brain tumors for more than four decades and gained more attention in the recent two decades. Although chemotherapy has demonstrated its effectiveness in the management of some pediatric brain tumors, failure or inactiveness of chemotherapy is commonly met in the clinics and clinical trials. Some of these failures might be attributed to the blood-brain barrier (BBB), limiting the penetration of systemically administered chemotherapeutics into pediatric brain tumors. Therefore, various strategies have been developed and used to address this issue. Herein, we review different methods reported in the literature to circumvent the BBB for enhancing the present of chemotherapeutics in the brain to treat pediatric brain tumors.
小儿脑肿瘤是儿童时期最常见的癌症，也是儿童死亡的主要原因之一。四十多年来，化疗一直被用作小儿脑肿瘤手术和放疗的辅助（即术后）或新辅助（即术前）治疗，在最近二十年中受到了更多关注。尽管化疗已证明其在治疗某些小儿脑肿瘤方面的有效性，但在临床和临床试验中，化疗失败或无效的情况却很常见。其中一些失败可能归因于血脑屏障（BBB），它限制了全身给药的化疗药物渗透到小儿脑肿瘤中。因此，人们已经开发并采用了各种策略来解决这个问题。在此，我们综述了文献中报道的不同方法，以绕过血脑屏障，增强化疗药物在脑中的存在，从而治疗小儿脑肿瘤。
