Abstract
This review is written with the purpose to review the current nanomedicine literature and provide an outlook on the developments in utilizing nanoscale drug constructs in treatment of solid cancers as well as in the potential treatment of multi-drug resistant cancers. No specific design principles for this review have been utilized apart from our active choice to avoid results only based on in vitro studies. Few drugs based on nanotechnology have progressed to clinical trials, since most are based only on in vitro experiments which do not give the necessary data for the research to progress towards pre-clinical studies. The area of nanomedicine has indeed spark much attention and holds promise for improved future therapeutics in the treatment of solid cancers. However, despite much investment few targeted therapeutics have successfully progressed to early clinical trials, indicating yet again that the human body is complicated and that much more understanding of the fundamentals of receptor interactions, physics of nanomedical constructs and their circulation in the body is indeed needed. We believe that nanomedical therapeutics can allow for more efficient treatments of resistant cancers, and may well be a cornerstone for RNA based therapeutics in the future given their general need for shielding from the harsh environment in the blood stream.
Highlights
Around 50 % of humans who are diagnosed with a malignant tumor will die from their disease
Evaluation of therapeutic effect on cancer stem cells (CSCs)’s Because CSCs are so rare, their elimination cannot be quantified by standard evaluation parameters such as tumor regression rates or retardation of tumor growth rates
Elimination or re‐education of the proliferating CSCs Proliferating CSCs are highly susceptible to conventional chemotherapeutic drugs [6, 149]
Summary
Around 50 % of humans who are diagnosed with a malignant tumor will die from their disease. In 2012, the actual figures for 40 European countries were 3.45 million new registered cases of various cancers and 1.75 million deaths from malignancies. 90 % of the recurrences of cancers after the primary general therapy (endocrine as well as chemical) are caused by the genes coding for multiple drug resistance (MDR) [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Many cancer therapies kill the bulk cells of a tumor but fail to cure the patient because they do not eliminate cancer stem cells (CSCs), [8, 10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22] which survive to generate new tumors.
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