Indeed, a large proportion of what is nowadays published, especially in chemistry and nonspecialized journals, relates to nanosized carriers (nanoparticles, nanocapsules, drug–polymer conjugates, etc.) aimed at directing anticancer drugs to neo- plastic tissues. In such systems, the tumor-targeting principle generally relies on the enhanced permeation and retention (EPR) effect. However, this constitutes the main limitation of the “nanomedicine” dogma, since the EPR effect is increasingly recognized to be much less prominent in humans than in the classical rodent models employed to demonstrate antitumoral activity.

One might ask whether some of these things are “funding bait”, going after high-profile subjects like cancer with high-profile approaches like nanotechnology. It would be unfair to characterize the whole field like this, but it would be unrealistic to pretend that this isn’t a factor, either. And by “funding”, I have in mind both academic grants and industrial biopharma money as well.

They’re certainly “publication bait” in many cases, and that’s one of LeRoux’s big points: the specialist journals in this area are publishing a bit less of the gaudy stuff, which is instead showing up in the broader-interest journals. And that stuff is perhaps not getting the detailed reviewing it should when it moves up in this fashion, which is a general problem in the literature. You end up with a situation where the highest-profile publications end up as some of the less potentially reproducible ones, a situation that the chemists and biologists in the crowd will be familiar with. Toxicity is just one of the issues that can get swept under the scientific rug under these conditions.

Reproducibility is another thing that LeRoux highlights, and he makes the (valid) point that in a field as close to the clinic as drug formulation and delivery that it really should have higher standards than usual. These are technologies that could have direct impact on human patients and volunteers, and some serious money will be spent in that regard. The field is not well served by the excuse that finicky details are hard to translate from one lab to another – this is an area, like process chemistry, that is supposed to be hammering those sorts of things out, not using them to rationalize trouble. The whole point is generating robust work.