Topic: Nanoarchitectures and Natural-based Products in Cancer Drug Resistance: Time to Converge Biology and Engineering

Although cancer brought much warning for the community and it caused problems for the public healthcare system, the emergence of chemotherapy improved the prognosis and survival rate of patients and the physicians were hopeful to cure cancer. However, frequent and long-term application of chemotherapy drugs caused the development of drug resistance in the patients and this led to therapy failure and unfortunately, death in the patients. Therefore, researchers focused on findings new solutions for the cancer drug resistance. Although combination of chemotherapy drugs with different mechanisms of actions was suggested as a possibility in improving cancer therapy, the problem is that tumor cells can develop multidrug resistance and moreover, since chemotherapy drugs have concentration-related side effects, the combination of chemotherapy drugs also cause high toxicity on the normal tissues and organs of patients. Hence, new types of therapies should be used for overcoming cancer drug resistance. In the current special issue, the aim is to develop novel therapeutics for reversing chemoresistance. The nanoparticles have been emerged as new therapies for cancer drug resistance and they can suppress drug efflux transporters, provide co-delivery of drugs and genes, and enhance intracellular accumulation of drugs in suppressing cancer drug resistance. Furthermore, the natural products are popular owing to their high anti-cancer activity, pleiotropic function, high biocompatibility and ability of suppressing tumorigenesis. Therefore, the current issue will bring the papers related to application of nanoparticles and phytochemicals in suppressing cancer drug resistance.

Cancer therapy, Nanoparticles, Nanobiotechnology, Phytochemicals, Natural products, Cancer drug resistance

15 Nov 2024