Chapter 4 - Role of nanotechnology in cancer therapies: recent advances, current issues, and approaches

Abstract

Cancer remains a great threat to humans and its treatments are limited to chemotherapy, surgery, and radiotherapy. Such treatment strategies cannot be considered clinically safe because toxicity concern healthy cells. Currently, nanomaterial (NMs) based multifunctional therapies have manifested outstanding potential in clinical oncology. The developed new generation therapies have overcome drawbacks including nonselectivity, poor bioavailability, and cytotoxicity. In this book chapter, we discussed recent strategies for the use of NMs and nanotechnology in cancer therapy. We mainly focus on a variety of cancer therapies, including photothermal therapy, photodynamic therapy, chemodynamic therapy, sonodynamic therapy, starvation therapy, gene therapy, immunotherapy, and other therapeutic techniques aiming to provide inspiration for the understanding of better-quality therapeutic outcomes and promote the next generation cancer therapy development and lay the foundation for its upcoming translation to clinical applications.