Nanotargeted radiopharmaceuticals for cancer theranostics

Abstract In this modern era still, the final destination of cancer is death. Chemotherapy, surgery, and radiotherapy are few conventional ways to treat cancers. However, drawbacks of most of the chemotherapeutic drugs are their poor solubility, toxicity to normal cells, and poor penetration through the biological membranes into the cancerous tissues. Hence, anticancer nanomedicines development based on liposomes, dendrimers, micelles, nanoparticles, and carbon nanotubes are very much required to minimize the exposure of chemotherapeutic drugs to normal tissues and to achieve targetability to particular diseased site using some targeting vectors. Traditionally, radiation therapy is further a treatment strategy to diminish the growth or size of cancer tissues or to diagnose cancer occurrence site. Recently, nanotechnology-based anticancer drug delivery added a new era where both the therapy and diagnosis may be possible by incorporation of some radioisotopes with these nanomedicines which acts as nanovectors, leading to development of nanotargeted theranostic radiopharmaceuticals for cancer therapy.