Core/Shell structured nanoparticles for imaging and therapy

Abstract

Introduction: Nanoparticles have several exciting applications in various fields of biomedicine. It has been found that among different classes of nanoparticles core/shell is most promising for field of nano-medical imaging and therapy due to their distinct advantages. The core/shell type nanoparticles can be generally comprising of two nanoparticles one act as a core (inner material) and the second act as a shell (outer layer material). the aim of this study in brief is to explore a historical review of the core/shell nanoparticles in past two decades. Materials and Methods: An organized search of Web of Science, Google Scholar and Scopus was made to select papers with different classes of Core/Shell nanoparticles from the time of introduction to August 2017. The search was limited to English language documents. Titles and abstracts were carefully assessed. Results: Eighty - nine studies were considered as relevant for this review. Of these 64, 18 and 7 studies were classified as inorganic/inorganic, inorganic/organic or organic/inorganic, and organic/organic material core/shell nanoparticles. In general, it is considering that inorganic/inorganic (metal or metal-oxide) core/shell nanoparticles are the most common and important class of all the different types of core/shell nanoparticles but still there are lots of work need to be done in order to verify their applications. Conclusion: It seems that, core/shell nanoparticles have strikingly superior over simple nanoparticles and also the inorganic/inorganic core/shell nanoparticles are extensively studied due to their wide applications in cancer treatment, bio imaging and cell targeting.