Nanotechnology in cancer treatment

Cancer is one of the major causes of mortality in the world, and the worldwide incidence of cancer continues to increase. The common strategy of cancer treatments is restricted to surgical resection of the tumor followed by either chemotherapy or radiation or combination of both of them. Poor drug delivery to the target site leads to various and significant complications, such as multi drug resistance. Recent developments in nanotechnology have provided researchers with new tools for cancer imaging and treatment. This technology has enabled the development of nano scale devices that can be conjugated with several functional molecules simultaneously, including tumor-specific ligands, antibodies, anticancer drugs, and imaging probes. These Nano devices can be easily transferred through leaky blood vessels and interact with targeted tumor-specific proteins both on the surface of and inside cancer cells. Therefore, their applications as cancer cell-specific delivery vehicles will be a significant addition to the currently available armory for cancer therapeutics and imaging.

This topic is important in my career because it's closely related to biochemistry, and other careers like chemistry, medicine and engineering. I choose it because in my faculty there is a professor who is a biochemist and pharmaceutical chemist, and he is developing a research on this. I learned about them when I went to a symposium of biochemistry and my professor went to give a talk of this research. The disadvantages that has this treatment was some nano particles cause liver injury due to its high toxicity.  There are also safety problems with particular nano particles that can cross the blood-brain barrier. The advantages are currently most nano particles use nontoxic and biodegradable ingredients, so toxicity is not a problem.

Nano particles provide a bright future of new generation of cancer therapeutics. Furthermore, the development of multi functional nano particles may eventually render nano particles able to detect and kill cancer cells simultaneously.