Nanomaterials for Cancer Therapy and Imaging

Abstract

A variety of organic and inorganic nanomaterials with dimensions below several hundred nanometers are recently emerging as promising tools for cancer therapeutic and diagnostic applications due to their unique characteristics of passive tumor targeting. A wide range of nanomedicine platforms such as polymeric micelles, liposomes, dendrimers, and polymeric nanoparticles have been extensively explored for targeted delivery of anti-cancer agents, because they can accumulate in the solid tumor site via leaky tumor vascular structures, thereby selectively delivering therapeutic payloads into the desired tumor tissue. In recent years, nanoscale delivery vehicles for small interfering RNA (siRNA) have been also developed as effective therapeutic approaches to treat cancer. Furthermore, rationally designed multi-functional surface modification of these nanomaterials with cancer targeting moieties, protective polymers, and imaging agents can lead to fabrication versatile theragnostic nanosystems that allow simultaneous cancer therapy and diagnosis. This review highlights the current state and future prospects of diverse biomedical nanomaterials for cancer therapy and imaging.

Advanced targeted therapies in cancer: Drug nanocarriers, the future of chemotherapy

“…Looking into the future, the use of cancer theragnostics, combining anticancer targeted therapy and diagnosis by multifunctional nanocarriers that contain therapeutic and imaging agents, might become promising cancer treatments because they allow to detect selectively cancerous cells, kill them with minimal side effects, visualize them thought real time in vivo imaging techniques, and monitor the effects generated by the treatment in real time [565].…”

The use and importance of liposomes in Positron Emission Tomography

“…By the production of finally developed liposomes, active targeting can be performed with the help of target specific ligands such as mAb (Blakey, 1992), avidin-biotin complexes or receptor specific peptides. Researchers, also, study on novel liposomal carrier systems called theragnostic liposomes that can be formulated by encapsulating therapeutic drugs in the aqueous core and anchoring the radionuclide, contrast agent or paramagnetic contrast agent on the lipid bilayer that provides both diagnosis and therapy at the same time with the same carrier system (Bae et al 2011;Janib et al 2010). Additionally by the modification of some cell penetrating peptides and protein transduction domains such as trans-activating transcriptional activator peptide (TATp) Torchilin et al 2003), polyarginines, PEP-1, penetratin (Sawant et al 2010), some molecular probes or triphenylphosphonium cations for subcellular targeting to mitochondria (Boddapati et al 2010;Boddapati et al 2005)molecular imaging and/or therapy can be performed by delivering drugs (Weissig et al 2006), antisense oligonucleotides and small interfering RNA (Fattal et al 2009), DNA (Weissig et al 2006), gene or proteins (Pisal et al 2010) inside the cell.…”

Targeted Nanoparticles for Cancer Therapy

“…VEGF has been shown to stimulate the proliferation, migration and invasion of endothelial by interacting with a family of tyrosine kinase receptor expressed on vascular endothelium. VEGF is also known to have the ability to enhance the permeability of microvessels, favoring the rapid and reversible increases in extravasation of plasma protein in tissue [16]. In the angiogenesis process, different phases can be distinguished: Dilation of existing vessels, endothelial cell activation, migration and proliferation, hyperpermeability of postcapillary venules and vessel destabilization, basement membrane degradation by proteases such as matrix metalloproteases, cathepsines, urokinase and plasmin, endothelial cell migration, vessel formation and angiogenic remodeling [17].…”