Cancer Nanotechnology: Recent Trends and Developments (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide especially in low income and middle income countries. As we all know, cancer is malignant neoplasm. There is uncontrolled division of cells which enter into normal adjacent tissues and destroy them. Often the abnormal cells also spread into other parts of the body via lymph or blood, popularly the situation known as metastasis. According to WHO (World Health Organization), cancer accounted for 7.4 million deaths in 2004 which extended to 7.6 million which was about 13% of all human cell deaths in 2007. Breast cancer, colorectal cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer and stomach cancer are some of the major types of cancer existing today. Deaths from cancer are continuously rising worldwide with a projection of about 12 million deaths from cancer in 2030. Thereby, over the past few years, tremendous attention has been given to the cancer related research and developments. There has been an outstanding progress in the basic cancer biology. Many institutions, pharmaceutical and biotechnological industries have focused on cancer as their main target in their research and development departments. However, in spite of this progress in cancer research, comparable advances in cancer therapeutics have not taken place. The main reason for this failure was inability to deliver therapeutic moieties that selectively reach the desired targets which also resulted in unintended effects (1,2). In addition to this, inability of a therapeutic formulation to cross biological barriers has also been one of the main hindrances. To overcome above mentioned obstacles in cancer therapeutics, Nanotechnology seems to be a promising tool.