Effective drug delivery systems are crucial for achieving targeted, controlled, and efficient therapeutic delivery while enhancing stability or bioavailability. Drug encapsulation within nanostructured materials is a widely researched approach to boosting overall efficacy. These materials can be functionalized to respond to specific triggers for drug release, such as the pH value of infected tissues or tumors. The self-assembly of protein nanocages, including non-enveloped viruses, bacteriophages, virus-like particles (VLPs), and protein structures like ferritin, has been studied for advanced material design applications. They allow encapsulating or attaching drug molecules and tailoring surface modification for targeted delivery. VLPs are a class of protein nanocages that are colloidally and structurally similar to wild viruses but lack genomes for replication.