%0 Journal Article
%T Nanotechnology in Cancer Drug Delivery and Selective Targeting
%A Kumar Bishwajit Sutradhar
%A Md. Lutful Amin
%J ISRN Nanotechnology
%D 2014
%R 10.1155/2014/939378
%X Nanoparticles are rapidly being developed and trialed to overcome several limitations of traditional drug delivery systems and are coming up as a distinct therapeutics for cancer treatment. Conventional chemotherapeutics possess some serious side effects including damage of the immune system and other organs with rapidly proliferating cells due to nonspecific targeting, lack of solubility, and inability to enter the core of the tumors resulting in impaired treatment with reduced dose and with low survival rate. Nanotechnology has provided the opportunity to get direct access of the cancerous cells selectively with increased drug localization and cellular uptake. Nanoparticles can be programmed for recognizing the cancerous cells and giving selective and accurate drug delivery avoiding interaction with the healthy cells. This review focuses on cell recognizing ability of nanoparticles by various strategies having unique identifying properties that distinguish them from previous anticancer therapies. It also discusses specific drug delivery by nanoparticles inside the cells illustrating many successful researches and how nanoparticles remove the side effects of conventional therapies with tailored cancer treatment. 1. Introduction Cancer is one of the most serious fatal diseases in today¡¯s world that kills millions of people every year. It is one of the major health concerns of the 21st century which does not have any boundary and can affect any organ of people from any place [1]. Cancer, the uncontrolled proliferation of cells where apoptosis is greatly disappeared, requires very complex process of treatment. Because of complexity in genetic and phenotypic levels, it shows clinical diversity and therapeutic resistance. A variety of approaches are being practiced for the treatment of cancer each of which has some significant limitations and side effects [2]. Cancer treatment includes surgical removal, chemotherapy, radiation, and hormone therapy. Chemotherapy, a very common treatment, delivers anticancer drugs systemically to patients forquenching the uncontrolled proliferation of cancerous cells [3]. Unfortunately, due to nonspecific targeting by anticancer agents, many side effects occur and poor drug delivery of those agents cannot bring out the desired outcome in most of the cases. Cancer drug development involves a very complex procedure which is associated with advanced polymer chemistry and electronic engineering. The main challenge of cancer therapeutics is to differentiate the cancerous cells and the normal body cells. That is why the main
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.nanotechnology/2014/939378/