Future prospects and challenges in cancer drug delivery

Abstract Cancer is a scourge of multicellular organisms since time immemorial and is a cause of mortality in millions of people across the globe cutting across ethnicity, race, and gender. Humanity has been working tirelessly to find innovative therapies against different forms of cancer but there is still a long distance to go before we can say that we are close to winning the war against this dreaded disease with multiple issues that need to be sorted. One of the major issues with any cancer therapy is deleterious side effects on the healthy cells around the cancer site where the therapy is targeted. Oncological researchers are trying to come up with new, efficient, and innovative therapies which can reduce/minimize the critical side effects which result from conventional therapies. Although multiple newer therapies are either in clinical trials or already been used for treating patients but at the same they have been associated with multiple challenges about their use in both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. In this chapter, we will provide an in-depth analysis of the most innovative advances in basic and applied cancer research. The topics covered in depth in this article are emerging/newer techniques like inorganic nanoparticles, dendrimers, protein nanoparticles, polymeric micelles, liposomes, carbon nanotubes, quantum dots, biopolymeric nanoparticles, and exosomes. The reader will get in-depth understanding of the above techniques, their advantages/disadvantages, and the current status.