Abstract: The clinical application of chemotherapeutic drugs has been limited due to the lack of tumor selectivity which causes different degrees of adverse reactions. Transferrin receptor(TfR) is one of the targets for tumor targeted drug delivery system because it is over-expressed in many kinds of tumor cells and tumor-associated blood vessels, but is low-expressed in normal cells. By modifying drug carriers or coupling antitumor drugs with ligands that have high specific affinity for TfR, it is expected to achieve targeted therapy of TfR over-expressed tumors. In this paper, the application progress of TfR functional ligands in tumor targeted drug delivery in recent years is summarized, in order to provide reference for the research of TfR targeted drug delivery systems.