Nanomedicine in Gastric Cancer

In recent years, nanomedicine, which is the application of nanotechnology to medicine, has shown an unprecedented expansion with the development of new nanoparticles and is expected to significantly improve the diagnosis and treatment of deadly diseases, such as cancer. Patients with gastric cancer, a common form of cancer worldwide, suffer in part from the poor sensitivity and lack of specificity of conventional diagnostic methods and, conversely, from the small number of treatment options, which makes it difficult to treat. Nanoparticles have unique biological properties that can enhance the process of developing new drugs and provide many benefits to the diagnosis of gastric cancer. In this book chapter, we discuss the application of nanoparticles in three different fields: treatment, diagnostics, and theranostics of gastric cancer. First, we will discuss how nanoparticles function as carriers of chemotherapeutic drugs to increase their therapeutic index and how they can function as therapeutic agents in photodynamic, gene, and thermal therapy. Second, we will discuss the importance of nanoparticles as imaging agents that can be applied in systemic and locoregional imaging, for early detection and elucidation of circulating tumour cells (CTCs). Third, we will describe how nanoparticles can combine diagnosis and therapy as theranostic agents.