MSN Anti‐Cancer Nanomedicines: Chemotherapy Enhancement, Overcoming of Drug Resistance, and Metastasis Inhibition

In the anti‐cancer war, there are three main obstacles resulting in high mortality and recurrence rate of cancers: the severe toxic side effect of anti‐cancer drugs to normal tissues due to the lack of tumor‐selectivity, the multi‐drug resistance (MDR) to free chemotherapeutic drugs and the deadly metastases of cancer cells. The development of state‐of‐art nanomedicines based on mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) is expected to overcome the above three main obstacles. In the view of the fast development of anti‐cancer strategy, this review highlights the most recent advances of MSN anti‐cancer nanomedicines in enhancing chemotherapeutic efficacy, overcoming the MDR and inhibiting metastasis. Furthermore, we give an outlook of the future development of MSNs‐based anti‐cancer nanomedicines, and propose several innovative and forward‐looking anti‐cancer strategies, including tumor tissue−cell−nuclear successionally targeted drug delivery strategy, tumor cell‐selective nuclear‐targeted drug delivery strategy, multi‐targeting and multi‐drug strategy, chemo‐/radio‐/photodynamic‐/ultrasound‐/thermo‐combined multi‐modal therapy by virtue of functionalized hollow/rattle‐structured MSNs.