Integrating Traditional Chinese Medicine and Nanotechnology for Enhanced Management of Anti-Tumor Drug Toxicity

While anti-tumor drugs markedly improve patient survival, dose-limiting toxicities remain major constraints on clinical efficacy and quality of life. Conventional management strategies lack timeliness and precision. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and its active ingredients offer unique potential for mitigating anti-tumor drug toxicities through multi-component and multi-target regulation. However, the transformation of TCM is hampered by poor bioavailability and targeting. This review summarizes and evaluates an integrated strategy combining TCM with nanotechnology to develop novel nanomedicines. It elucidates the distinct toxicity mechanisms of chemotherapy drugs, targeted drugs, and immunotherapy drugs, revealing toxicopathological transitions from non-specific killing to microenvironment disruption and immune imbalance. Subsequently, it discusses the intervention mechanisms and research progress of TCM and its active ingredients targeting different categories of anti-tumor drug toxicity. To overcome delivery challenges, this review explores construction strategies for diverse nanodelivery systems, including carrier-free self-assembled nanomedicines, physically loaded nanomedicines, and chemically coupled nanomedicines, highlighting their value in organ-specific accumulation and controlled release. Finally, it objectively analyzes challenges in the clinical translation of these nanomedicines, encompassing safety and industrialization, while prospecting future trends, aiming to contribute to a new therapeutic paradigm focused on “toxicity attenuation and efficacy potentiation” and steer cancer treatment toward greater precision and intelligence.