Recent progress in nanomedicine for hepatocellular carcinoma therapy

: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide, with insidious onset, insensitive to chemotherapy and poor prognosis, which make its clinical treatment face an enormous challenge. In recent years, with the rapid development of nanotechnology, increasing kinds of nanomedicine come to the forefront in biomedical fields. Through rational design, nanomedicine can be prepared in suitable size and modified with specific liver targeting ligands. Moreover, various therapeutic agents of different mechanisms can be co-loaded into the same nanosystem, thus achieving the synergistic therapeutic effects towards HCC. Nanomedicine is able to enhance drug bioavailability and liver-targeting effect as well as reduce the side effects to normal tissues, which provide a great potential in HCC therapy. This review summarizes the recent progress in the application of nanomedicine for HCC therapy from two aspects: their liver-targeting design strategies and the recent progress in combination therapy of HCC.