Mesoporous silica nanoparticle: Heralding a brighter future in cancer nanomedicine

Abstract Throughout the decades, selective delivery of smart diagnostic agents as well as antitumor medications to tumor sites for early-stage cancer monitoring and avoiding hazardous effects on the healthy tissues, has been the dream of all researchers who willing to fight cancer. In recent years, clinical oncology has focused on optimizing the medical response to tumor disease by designing targeted delivery technologies that integrate the widely used antitumor medicines and diagnostic agents with targeted delivery mechanisms. In fact, a very destructive form of dosage is needed to remove tumors, which motive significant toxic effects within normal cells because of inadequate medication specificity for cancerous cells. Therefore, potentially localized delivery of medicines, as well as diagnostic agents, is a requirement to enhance the treatment effectiveness and minimize the adverse effects. Among the numerous nanostructures implemented so far, mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) have captured the interest of many researchers to be employed as nanocarriers that can handle the release of diagnostic/therapeutic agents both in time and space, leading it to be a novel promising type of the nano-based carriers to detection tumor and battling cancer. MSNs have also shown great potential for application in cancer immunotherapy, which will be discussed in this article. This article thus aims to provide a review of the mesoporous silica-based drug carriers, particularly for tumor detection and treatment, and also to stress the significance of a targeting feature grafted on the carrier surface, to fulfill nano-based systems for targeted delivery.