NANOPARTICULATE DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEM IN CANCER MEDICINE WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON THE RECENT ADVANCES IN NANOPARTICLES

Abstract

Chemotherapy and Nanoparticle drug delivery are the two areas that have shown significant promise in cancer treatment. Nanoparticle drug delivery, on the other hand enhances therapeutic effectiveness and reduces side effects of the drug payloads by improving their pharmacokinetics. These two active research fields have been recently merged to further improve the efficacy of cancer therapeutics. Conventional anticancer drugs display significant shortcomings which limit their use in cancer therapy. For this reason, important progress has been achieved in the field of nanotechnology to solve these problems and offer a promising and effective alternative for cancer treatment. Nanoparticle drug delivery systems exploit the abnormal characteristics of tumor tissues to selectively target their payloads to cancer cells, either by passive, active or triggered targeting. More recently developed nanoparticles are demonstrating the potential sophistication of these delivery systems by incorporating multifunctional capabilities and targeting strategies in an effort to increase the efficacy of these systems against the most difficult cancer challenges, including drug resistance and metastatic disease. This review focuses on the potential of nanoparticle drug delivery system in cancer treatment and the current advances achieved. It  summarizes the recent efforts in developing nanoparticle platforms to concurrently deliver multiple types of drug for cancer treatment. Apart from this it also highlight the challenges and design specifications that need to be considered in optimizing nanoparticulate based-cancer therapy.