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With the success of recent developments in cancer technologies to optimize the therapeutic properties of new drugs, biologics, and delivery devices, a slow trend in the reduction of their clinical failures has been observed. Since the late 1900s, many drugs have been approved by the European Medicines Association (EMA) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and are currently available in the market for the treatment of cancer. The FDA’s database at ClinicalTrials.gov stores all clinical trial drug information, which has made it easy for scientists to conduct research. Thus, new formulations and technologies are continuously being developed for cancer treatment. By January 2010, 939 trials had evaluated cancer drug delivery systems. This chapter provides an overview of the technological advances and emerging trends in drug delivery formulations along with their respective limitations and challenges.

Small interfering RNA (siRNA) has been identified as a useful therapeutic resource in cancer therapy. Molecular manipulation with siRNA has been reported to have high therapeutic potential on the cells with excessive gene overexpression or caused by mutation. However, siRNA therapeutic approaches are pursuing effective and efficient delivery systems for in vivo applications due to the lack of stable, low cell uptake, and the high likelihood of function loss due to enzymatic degradation. The chapter comprises various approaches used to improve siRNA delivery focusing on nanoparticles with a common goal and superior effectiveness. Besides, this chapter discusses problems and prospects for creating safe and effective siRNA delivery systems in cancer therapy, focusing on nanoparticles. Similarly, it assesses the recent progress achieved by nanomaterials, including biodegradables, liposomes, polyplex, lipoplex, and dendrimers with the transmission of small interfering RNA (siRNA). The morphology, structure, and preparation of different nanoparticles and their strengths, along with the recent progress of siRNA carrier systems in preclinical and clinical research, are also addressed in detail.

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.

The nonhazardous radiofrequency (RF)-aided cancer treatment is very famous in the oncology field as it is highly penetrable in deep-rooted cancers, enabling better therapeutic efficacy. Recently various research works have focused on RF-sensitive nanocarriers for drug delivery applications. This chapter briefs about different RF-sensitive therapeutic nanocarriers based on metals and nonmetals for anticancer drug delivery. Additionally, more emphasis is placed on their applications and future perspectives.

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Delivery of a cancer therapeutic to its intended extracellular or intracellular target, which is required for achieving therapeutic efficacy, involves multiple kinetic processes. This chapter outlines the complex and dynamic biological properties of solid tumors that may limit the therapeutic from reaching its target, and describes the application of chemical engineering tools (e.g., multiscale modeling and computational fluid dynamics) in quantitative systems pharmacology research. The discussions include both conventional small-molecule drugs and nanotherapeutics as the latter represents a new promising therapeutic strategy in translational cancer research. Examples of our earlier work demonstrate the successful use of computational modeling to predict drug delivery in solid tumors as functions of time and intratumoral location and to use such predictions for therapy development in cancer patients.

Spatial and temporal control over drug release has rendered stimuli-responsive nanoparticles to be one of the most popular cancer drug delivery systems. Nanomaterial-based photo-triggered drug delivery (PDD) encompasses the advantages of stimuli-responsive drug delivery by utilizing light in conjunction with a photosensitizer, drug, or imaging agent to trigger and enhance a diagnosis and increase therapeutic efficacy. Thus, by localizing these nanomaterials specifically at the tumor site, researchers have successfully achieved cancer cell-specific drug delivery, therapy, and diagnosis. This chapter explores these state-of-the-art nanomaterial based-PDD technologies for cancer theranostics. We will revisit several applications and mechanisms of PDD and review various factors to be considered while developing a PDD system. Finally, the limitations and the future of PDD will also be briefly discussed.

Their high surface area, open porosity, and adjustable pore size render nanofibers a distinct class of candidates suitable for site-specific controlled drug delivery. Bionanofibers can be fabricated using numerous types of polymers, both synthetic and natural, with various techniques. Currently, the three major techniques employed to fabricate nanofibers are (1) electrospinning, (2) self-assembly, and (3) temperature-induced phase separation with electrospinning being the most popular. For therapeutic purposes, different types of drugs, growth factors, and genes may be either internalized within the nanofibers or surface-conjugated. Due to the versatility of drugs being used, these drug-loaded nanofibers can be utilized in many clinical applications including cutaneous wound dressing, cancer drug delivery, and inhibition of scar formation as well as reconstruction of various tissues. This chapter entails information about nanofibers fabricated by different techniques as well as their applications in drug delivery and tissue regeneration.

Nanotechnology is a smarter way to apply a multimodal approach in biomedical science, especially in the therapeutic, targeting, and imaging areas. Among the various nanoplatforms, polymeric and lipid-based nanostructures have been of considerable interest to drug-delivery formulators due to the complementary functional advantages of both lipids and polymers. These multifunctional, hybrid architectures possess better attributes for drug delivery such as high loading capacity, improved stability, ease of anchoring ligands, surface manipulation, tuneable drug release, loading multiple therapeutics, and excellent in vivo performance. Nanostructures comprised of hybrid materials are poised to emerge as a new avenue in the delivery of various therapeutics including complex diseases like cancer. Polymer–lipid hybrid (PLH) nanostructures can be of various types such as polymer core–lipid shell, core–shell-type hollow lipid–polymer nanoparticulates, monolithic lipid–polymer hybrid nanoparticulates, and polymer-caged liposomes. The main focus of this chapter is to provide an overview of PLH nanostructures and their current state for cancer drug delivery.