The Golden Age in Cancer Nanobiotechnology: Quo Vadis?

Since Richard Feynman and his famous talk “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” in an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech in 1959, Nanotechnology has led to the development of novel materials and devices with a wide-range of applications, especially in imaging, diagnostics, and therapy, which contributed to the early detection and treatment of cancer and metastasis (Ferrari, 2005; Conde et al., 2012a; Schroeder et al., 2012). Although Nanotechnology is thought to be a new branch of Science that has only emerged over the past decade, nanoparticles (for example, gold nanoparticles) have been used, even though inadvertently, for several thousand years (Salata, 2004). In fact, these nanoparticles have been regarded as precious for as long as humans have existed, and have been associated from the time of gods and kings to the time of Faraday (Wagner et al., 2000; Edwards and Thomas, 2007). Today, nanotechnology is a flourishing field that is helping to address critical global problems from cancer treatment to climate change. In fact, nanotechnology is everywhere and is everyday practice. Nowadays, nanomaterials and nanoparticles have gained increasing interest due to their extraordinary electrical, optical, and chemical properties, high stability and biological compatibility, controllable morphology and size dispersion, and easy surface functionalization (Anker et al., 2008; Parveen et al., 2012; Conde et al., 2014a). A unique feature of nanomaterials in the nanometer range (such as high surface-to-volume ratio or size-dependent optical properties) is that they are radically different from those of their bulk materials and with a huge potential to be used in the clinical field for disease diagnostics and therapeutics (Kim, 2007; Heath and Davis, 2008). The most common bioapplications in which nanomaterials and nanoparticles have been used so far are labeling, delivering, heating, sensing, and detection (Sperling et al., 2008), using several approaches, such as gene delivery, tumor targeting, or drug delivery, especially in cancer (Figure 1). Cancer is the one of first leading causes of mortality worldwide, with more than 14 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer-related deaths only in 2012. According to the National Cancer Institute, in 2015, an estimated 1.5 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed and almost 600,000 cancer deaths will occur only in the United States (Siegel et al., 2014). The three most common cancers in 2015 are projected to be breast cancer, lung and bronchus cancer, and prostate cancer. And the problem is far away from getting better. The global cancer rates could increase by 50% to 15 million by 2020, according to a report from theWorldHealthOrganization. And the national costs for cancer care in the United States totaled nearly $125 billion in 2010 and could reach $156 billion in 2020. Although we have assisted in the last 50 years to rapid technological advances, the full understanding of the molecular onset of this disease is still far from being achieved, as well as the search for new mechanisms of treatment that rely on selectivity and specificity toward cancer cells only (Peer et al., 2007). It is here that nanotechnology enters the fight offering a prosperity of utensils for cancer diagnostics and therapy. The main challenge is to develop a system capable of circulating in the blood stream undetected by the immune system or being applied locally for sustained release