Targeting nanomaterials: future drugs for cancer chemotherapy

Yibo Zhang, Tianfeng Chen

Department of Chemistry, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China

Concerning the recent articles published in your journal on multifunctional nanosystem for cancer chemotherapy.¹ It should be an admirable approach to kill cancer cells, with the least side effects on normal tissues and cells. During the past few decades, various chemotherapeutic agents, such as cyclophosphamide, fluorouracil, platinum-based compounds, anthracycline, hydroxycamptothecin and paclitaxel, have been designed and proved to be effective toward cancer cells. However, regrettably, these drugs are non-targeted to cancer, and thus serious side effects to normal cells or tissues are unavoidable.² Therefore, new drugs with selective cytotoxicity become an important research focus in cancer chemotherapy. Another obstacle for chemotherapy is the multidrug resistance. Actually, several targeted drugs such as RTK inhibitors, FTase inhibitors, tumor angiogenesis inhibitors, campath, avastin and erbitux, have been commercialized and widely used clinically.³ However, drug resistance seriously limited their anticancer efficacy. Nanotechnology-based approaches are anticipated to provide a new breakthrough for targeting cancer cells and bypassing their multidrug resistance.⁴

View original paper by Wang and colleagues.