Smart Nanocarrier-Based Cancer Therapeutics

Considerable advances in the field of cancer have been made; however, these have not been translated into similar clinical progress which results in the high prevalence and increased cancer-related mortality rate worldwide. Available treatments have several challenges such as off-target side effects, non-specific long-term potential biodisruption, drug resistance, and overall inadequate response rates and high probability of recurrence. The limitations associated with independent cancer diagnosis and therapy can be minimized by an emerging interdisciplinary research field of nanotheranostics which include successful integration of diagnosis and therapy on a single agent using nanoparticles. This may offer a powerful tool in developing innovative strategies to enable “personalized medicine” for diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Nanoparticles have been proven to be powerful imaging tools or potent agents for cancer diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. The nanotheranostic provides minimally invasive in vivo visualization of drug biodistribution and accumulation at the target site with real-time monitoring of therapeutic outcome. This chapter intends to cover several important aspects and the advances in the field of nanoparticles-mediated cancer therapeutics including nanocarrier development, drug/gene delivery, intrinsically active nanoparticles, tumor microenvironment, and nanotoxicity. The chapter represents an overview of challenges associated with cancer treatment, rational for nanotechnology in cancer therapeutics, novel concepts of multifunctional nanomaterials for cancer therapy along with their classification and their clinical prospective in different cancers. A special focus is on the nanotechnology: regulatory perspective for drug development in cancer therapeutics. Obstacles hindering further development of nanomaterials-mediated cancer therapy are also discussed. In general, the objective of this chapter is to improve our perceptive in the design and development of nanotechnology for cancer therapeutics.