Nanomaterials Mediated Multimodal Combined Treatment for Cancer

Abstract

Cancer is still one of the most serious diseases that threaten human life. In the past decades, nanomaterials have been found to possess excellent advantages, including controlled drug release, easy modification surface, good biocompatibility, typical optical property, useful chemical ability, and so on, due to which they have become the rising star in the application for multimodal combined cancer treatment (MCT). The emerging avenues of photodynamic therapy, photothermal therapy, magnetocaloric therapy, chemodynamic therapy, immunotherapy, and gene therapy are integrated systematically and intelligently with the traditional methods, realizing the therapeutic effect in cancer treatment. However, there are still several challenges in the development of nanomaterials for MCT, such as the construction of complex systems, deep penetration into solid tumors, effective immune activation at tumor sites, and so on. This review describes the application of multifunctional nanomaterials in the field of MCT for tumor, proposing some suggestions and ideas for future development.

Keywords: Multifunctional nanomaterials; anti-cancer; controlled drug release; enhanced therapeutic effect; multimodal combined treatment; photothermal therapy.