Recent decades have witnessed the tremendous progress of nanobiotechnology in cancer treatment [1,2]. Nano-based drug delivery systems (DDS) are one of the most widely investigated strategies to improve the targetability of therapeutic molecules, increase circulation time, and enhance the total bioavailability [3]. As important constituents of nano-based DDS, various nanomaterials like organic nanomaterials, inorganic nanomaterials, and hybrid nanomaterials have been intensively explored in anticancer drug delivery, owing to their unique properties [4,5,6]. The delivery of therapeutic agents using nanomaterials holds numerous advantages over their free drug counterparts, which can not only protect the encapsulated drugs from degradation or inactivation before reaching sites of action, but also enable the controlled drug release in specific environments. In addition, both passive and active targeting can be achieved via the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) phenomenon, or by means of extra modification [7,8]. Moreover, owing to the EPR effect, nanosystems possess the ability to improve the accumulation of chemotherapeutics both as single agent and in combination, which largely elevates the amounts of drugs in target tissue [9,10,11,12]. When it comes to active targeting, two main approaches are currently adopted to improve tumor accumulation of nanoparticles. One is to apply targeting molecules to endow the nanosystems with targetability [13,14]. The other is to modulate the protein corona of nanocarriers to provide a “natural targeting” towards TME [15,16,17]. In theory, nano-based DDS can be employed as an ideal vehicle in cancer treatment. However, many obstacles still impede the wide application of nanomedicine. For instance, although the EPR effect and active targeting approaches can modulate the biodistribution of nanomedicine to a certain extent, only a part of nanomedicine can reach the tumor sites while the majority of them are cleared by the reticuloendothelial system (RES) [18]. Moreover, EPR effect tends to be more efficient in some angiogenic tumor models with leaky blood, there are still some cases that are not suitable for EPR effect [19]. Besides, modification using targeting ligands could potentially compromise the stealth ability of the nano-based DDS [20]. Therefore, other novel strategies in combination with nanotechnology is of great necessity to achieve improved therapeutic performance.

Hopefully, cell-mediated drug delivery has become a promising approach in addressing the aforementioned limitations. This innovative strategy takes advantage of the natural properties of various cells such as prolonged circulation time in blood stream, specific targetability to tumor cells, the ability to cross challenging biological barriers, abundant surface ligands, flexible morphology, and cellular signaling or metabolism [21]. Very recently, d’Avanzo et al. reported a kind of peptide-functionalized-liposomes that were able to selectively bind breast cancer cells, which in vitro demonstrated the ability of the resultant liposomes to target M2-macrophages to exploit a potential hitchhiking effect in vivo, bridging the gap between conventional nanosystems and cell-derived ones [22]. Therefore, cooperating advanced nanomaterials with cell-based therapies can largely strengthen the total therapeutic efficacy through maximizing the advantages of both, while minimizing their inherent shortcomings. In this review, a number of novel DDSs, based on various cell types including leucocytes, erythrocytes, platelets, stem cells, and adipocytes will be highlighted (Figure 1). Different cell types possess distinctive properties, which enables their multifunctional application in personalized cancer treatment. It is discussed how nanomaterials empower the field of cell-based treatment and how cellular characteristics improve the performance of nanomedicine. Diverse delivery strategies that utilize living cell internalization or cell membrane-cloaking in cooperation with multiple treatment modalities including chemotherapy, phototherapy, gene therapy and immunotherapy will be introduced in detail. Table 1 is a summary of nanomaterials in cell-based drug delivery for cancer treatment. In addition, compared to the existing review articles about cell-based therapies, the novelty of this review is that we comprehensively summarize the most widely used cell types in cyto-pharmaceuticals, which highlights the combinational strategy of innovative nanomaterials and cell-derived vectors with very latest research examples [21,23]. Moreover, the current limitations and future orientations for cell-based therapies are also discussed in this paper to provide more detailed instruction for the development of cell therapies.