Nanomaterial Complexes Used in Cancer Therapies: Opportunities and Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

Conventional cancer therapeutics have limited effectiveness and low selectivity due to their poor solubility, inadequate biodistribution, low stability, and high toxicity. The most promising path to overcoming these limitations is through the use of smart nanomaterials. Nanomaterials, measuring 1–100 nm in size, have special optical, magnetic, electrical, and sound characteristics and are the best choice for controlled drug-delivery systems, diagnostics, and imaging. In recent years, quantum dots, metallic nanoparticles, liposomes, dendrimers, micelles, and polymeric nanoparticles have been used to engineer the composition, synthesis methods, size, morphology, and surface chemistry of therapeutic drugs. In doing so, they have improved drugs’ therapeutic efficacy by enhancing their sensitivity and capacity to be stimuli-responsive, extending their half-life, boosting their solubility, and ensuring their long-term release. Specifically, these nanomaterials not only prevent anti-cancer drugs from being degraded by enzymes, enhance their half-life in vivo, and improve their bio-distribution, but also help with their sustained release by targeting cancer sites, enable the delivery of multiple drugs to a single platform, and reduce drug resistance. However, some limitations, including toxicity, the uniform size/shape of nanomaterials, and limited biocompatibility with specific cell membranes, need to be resolved. Although stimuli-responsive nanomaterials enable targeted delivery to a specific site, achieving more precise imaging in biological systems is still a challenge. Various imaging modalities are currently available, and each has advantages and disadvantages. Thus, stimuli-responsive nanomaterial-activated multimodal imaging should be developed to enable doctors to obtain accurate and personalized information regarding patients’ diseases. Further, the responsiveness of multi-functional nanomaterials also needs to be considered, since their failure to respond to a stimulus can compromise the efficiency of the whole system. Today, studies mainly use universal nanoparticles that are able to incorporate drugs and genes simultaneously or separately and allow their release spatially or temporally. Thus, the use of theragnostic nanomaterials that can perform multiple actions at the same time should be explored for early diagnosis and therapy. Overall, stimuli-responsive smart nanomaterials hold great potential for improving the efficacy of cancer diagnosis and therapy, and new strategies should be developed to address the challenges in designing precise nanomedicines.

Dr. Ruizhuo Ouyang
Guest Editor

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• smart nanomaterials
• stimuli-responsive methods
• multimodal imaging
• drug delivery
• cancer diagnosis and therapy
• quantum dots
• metallic nanoparticles
• liposomes
• dendrimers
• micelles
• polymeric nanoparticles