Chick embryo chorioallantoic membrane as a suitable in vivo model to evaluate drug delivery systems for cancer treatment: A review

Abstract

Cancer represents a significant public health problem. More than 18.1 million people are annually diagnosed with cancer and 9.6 million die mainly due to metastatic disease. Chemotherapy has been one of the main cancer treatment modalities; however, most of the chemotherapeutic agents are non-specific, exhibiting several toxic side effects, which compromises the patient's quality of life. Therefore, it is necessary to search for new therapeutic alternatives, using for example, drug delivery systems (DDS) to target cancer cells, increasing the selectivity of chemotherapeutic drugs. This approach is promising; however, it is crucial to evaluate the biological performance of the systems. Although mammalian models continue to be explored for clinical applications, they are time-consuming and very restrictive from the ethical and legal perspectives. Hence, the chick embryo chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) has been shown to be a suitable in vivo model since it allows a more appropriate model for the study of drugs and/or DDS performance than in vitro tests. Thereby, this article revises the recent advances of DDS for cancer therapy, evaluating the feasibility of the CAM model.