Cancer nanomedicine: A step towards improving the drug delivery and enhanced efficacy of chemotherapeutic drugs

Abstract

Nanomedicine is a development of nanotechnology in medical research that can be used to discover an advanced treatment for all types of cancer. Conventional drug delivery systems (DDS) of chemotherapeutic drugs placed some critical challenges correlated with the poor specificity, sensitive toxicity, and therapeutic efficacy. Therefore, nanoformulation (NF) of chemotherapeutic drugs pledges to develop advanced DDS with lesser side effects and greater efficacy than the traditional treatments. The nanoscale formulation of chemotherapeutic drugs often referred to as cancer nanomedicines (CNs), assists in delivering and targeting the pharmaceutical, therapeutic, and diagnostic agents to cancer and other targeted cells. Consequently, NF of combined chemotherapeutic drugs improves the DDS by increasing the circulation time and bioavailability. This review summarizes a brief study of CNs, describing their multifunctionality, types of nano-carriers, the status of NFs in clinical trials, and enhanced efficacy of CNs and combined formulations to reduce the off-target toxic effect of chemotherapeutic drugs.

Keywords

• Cancer
• Chemotherapeutic drugs
• Nanomedicine
• Toxicity
• Bioavailability
• Multifunctionality