Fig. 1.

Schematic illustration of six different types of molecular building units that can be potentially used to create one-component nanomedicines (OCNs). Protein-polymer conjugates and antibody-drug conjugates can be regarded as OCN alone due to their well-defined three dimensional nanostructures. Polymer-drug conjugates and polypeptide-drug conjugates consisting of hydrophobic drugs and hydrophilic polymer have the potential to self-assemble or aggregate into nanostructures under appropriate conditions. Small molecule prodrugs can be made into nanoscale objects via either the nanoprecipitation procedure or the assembly approach. Drug amphiphiles are rationally designed self-assembling drug-peptide conjugates that can spontaneously associate into discrete, stable, well-defined nanostructures with a high and quantitative drug loading in aqueous solutions.