Cancer Nanomedicine: Special Focus on Cancer Immunotherapy

Cancer poses a major threat to people’s health around the world, and its treatment has remained as an extremely challenging issue. Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy had been used as the first-line treatment for many years. However, due to several problems, such as lack of efficacy and different side effects and high recurrence rate and metastasis, more specific approaches are still needed. During recent decades, several therapeutic options have been suggested as the alternative medicine instead of conventional cancer treatments. Among them, cancer immunotherapy is one of the most studied strategies which holds promises for personalized cancer medicine. With the emergence of nanomedicine and its combination with the novel treatment plans, efficacy and safety have been significantly improved. Nanotechnology-based immunotherapy not only enhanced the therapeutic effects of traditional immunotherapy (e.g., enhancing the effectiveness of cancer vaccines) but also broke down some of cancer’s barrier against treatment. These nanomaterials are capable of delivering immunomodulatory agents directly to the tumor microenvironment or cancer vaccines to antigen-presenting cells. Moreover, nanoparticles have become popular tools for early diagnosis of cancer. Thanks to advancing in this technology, cancer could be diagnosed much more quickly and more efficiently than conventional methods.