Nanomedicine in Cancer

Copyright: © Suh KS, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Nanotechnology in biomedical research has emerged as an interdisciplinary science that has quickly found its own niche in clinical methodologies including imaging, diagnostic, and therapeutics. The nano-based technology is expected to expand multi-directionally to provide unmet needs in medicine and has potential to generate unprecedented innovations that will bring breakthrough treatments to various human diseases, including cancer. Broadly accepted but generalized definition of cancer nanotechnology is that man-made particles that are size about 100 nm in a dimension. According to the size based definition, many different nano-scale delivery platforms fall into this category and various materials have been used for the construction, including liposomes [1], polymer-based platforms [2,3], dendrimers [4] [5], metal nanoparticle [6,7], nanocrystal [8], siliconand silica-based nanoparticle [9-11] and others. The major advantage of nanomedicine is multifunctionality that allows for delivery of large amounts of payload such as therapeutics or imaging contrast, active targeting, timed release, and stealth effect for avoidance of uptake from phagocytes. Consequently, a single nanoparticle can be implicated under multiple methods to perform multi-task and can be utilized to serve multiple functions.