Recent Advances in Tumor Targeting Approaches

Abstract

Tremendous technological advancement has been observed in the past few decades to combat ever increasing mortality rate in cancer therapy. It is now widely accepted that this reduction in mortality can be addressed effectively by materializing the concept of magic bullet, i.e., localizing the drug in concern at the site of action, thereby sparing normal tissues from unwanted toxicities and drastically improving the therapeutic efficacy. The present chapter inculcates such recent advances in the tumor targeting approaches. Basics of the peculiar tumor microenvironment and its discrimination from normal tissues have been primarily covered in brief to provide a background for the better understanding of the design and development of molecular and physicochemical targets. Concomitantly, barriers offered by altered tumor microenvironment to the drug delivery of anticancer drugs have been covered. The subsequent sections covers the conventional strategies for tumor targeting which essentially comprises passive targeting, active targeting, and physical targeting followed by recent advances in the tumor targeting approaches from clinical perspectives. These include deeper insights on molecular targeted therapies, tumor angiogenesis , cancer immunotherapy, and drug delivery of multiple drug resistance tumors. In a nutshell, with the advent of the molecularly targeted therapies, targeting tumor specific surface antigens and intracellular processes and components is a rapidly shifting paradigm of cancer therapy and unexceptional results have been observed till date by appropriately blending it with nanotechnology based approaches.