Nanomedicine in Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment

Nanomedicine brought a wise revolution in the field of medical biology which is significantly affecting the treatment of various major diseases like cancer, neurological disorders and cardiovascular diseases. The usage of different nanoparticles in the field of nanomedicine for diagnosis, monitoring, control, prevention and treatment of diseases is increasing day by day. Cancer remains a highly lethal disease and it is the second leading cause of death throughout the world. Traditional Cancer treatment and conventional immunotherapeutic approaches have inherent limitations that cannot properly distinguish the malignant cells from the healthy ones. Most importantly, both conventional chemotherapy and several immunomodulators in non-targeted cancer therapies often remove tumor cells at the expense of numerous normal cells, causing undesirable and sometimes fatal side effects. These limitations of cancer treatments have increased the interest in the field of nanomedicine to develop more effective and safer cancer therapy. The role of nanoparticles in cancer therapeutics has been to improve the overall therapeutic index by improving drug pharmacokinetics and reduce the systemic toxicities of chemotherapies by selectively targeting and delivering anticancer drugs to neoplastic tissues. Additionally, Nano-sized carriers effectively used for nanomedicine can be conjugated with specific ligand which specifically target malignant cells. Various nanoparticles like polymeric nanoparticles, dendrimers, liposomes, quantum dots, and metal nanoparticles (especially gold) are being explored and clinically approved for cancer therapy, imaging, and diagnostics. There are many nanotechnology-enabled therapeutic modulators which are currently under clinical inspection like for instance; chemotherapy, hyperthermia, radiation therapy, gene or RNA interference (RNAi) therapy and immunotherapy which can be probably become future therapeutic strategies for cancer.