(Nanowerk Spotlight) Applications with targeted nanoparticles are expected to revolutionize molecular imaging and cancer therapy. Cancer researchers are looking to nanoparticles as agents in various nanomedicine applications – as a drug carrier capable of localizing, attaching to, and directly releasing drugs into the cell nucleus; as a cellular biomarker; and as imaging and therapy agent in cancer medicine.

In today's chemotherapy, together with radiation and surgery the main tools against cancer, doctors are pumping the patient full of cytotoxic drugs, that go everywhere in the body, with the hope that enough of the drugs reach the cancer cells and target their nuclear DNA to damage it or destroy the cell. Not only do chemotherapeutic techniques have a range of often serious side effects, mainly affecting all the fast-dividing cells of the body, it also has been shown that often less than 1% of the administered drug molecules enter tumor cells and bind to the nuclear DNA.

Another complication is drug resistance of cancer cells. This actually is one of the main causes of failure in the treatment of cancer. Dividing cancer cells acquire genetic changes at a high rate, which means that the cells in a tumor that are resistant to a particular drug will survive and multiply. The result is the re-growth of a tumor that is not sensitive to the original drug.

Cancer researchers are therefore experimenting with nanoparticles as both contrast agent and drug carrier capable of pinpointing and destroying individual cancer cells.