Cancer stem cells (CSCs) have been identified in almost all cancers and give rise to metastases and can also act as a reservoir of cancer cells that may cause a relapse after surgery, radiation or chemotherapy. Thus they are obvious targets in therapeutic approaches and also a great challenge in cancer treatment. The threat presented by CSCs lies in their unlimited proliferative ability and multidrug resistance. These findings have necessitated an effective novel strategy to target CSCs for cancer treatment. Nanomaterials are on the route to providing novel methods in cancer therapies. Although there have been a large number of excellent work in the field of targeted cancer therapy, it remains an open question how nanomaterials can meet future demands for targeting and eradicating of cancer stem cells. In this review, we summarized recent and highlighted future prospects for targeting CSCs for cancer therapies by using a variety of nanomaterials.

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Nanomaterials in Targeting Cancer Stem Cells for Cancer Therapy.

Magnetic nanoparticles for environmental and biomedical applications: A review

Introduction: For many years, the controlled delivery of therapeutic compounds has been a matter of great interest in the field of nanomedicine. Among the wide amount of drug nanocarriers, magnetic...

Magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles for drug delivery: applications and characteristics.

The year 2015 marks the 50th anniversary since the discovery of the anticancer potential of cisplatin and it remains just as useful now as it did back then, especially for the treatment of some endocrine-related cancers like ovarian and testicular carcinomas. Since its discovery, five other platin drugs have received approval in various countries. While several new platin drugs are in preclinical development, in the last decade only two new platin drugs have entered clinical trials, LA-12 and dicycloplatin, reflecting a shift in research focus from new drug design to improved formulations of already approved platin drugs. These formulations include their encapsulation with macrocycles to slow and prevent their degradation by proteins and peptides; their attachment to nanoparticles to passively target solid tumours through the enhanced permeability and retention effect and their coordination to important nutrients, proteins, antibodies and aptamers for active tumour targeting. These formulation methods have all shown potential but none have yet yielded a new marketable medicine containing a platin drug. The reasons for this are problems of consistent drug loading, controlling the location and timing of drug release and the inherent toxicity of some of the drug delivery vehicles. In addition to drug delivery, functional genomics is now playing an increasing role in predicting patients' responses to platin chemotherapy and their likelihood of experiencing severe side effects.

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The state-of-play and future of platinum drugs

Magnetic nanoparticles for precision oncology: theranostic magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles for image-guided and targeted cancer therapy

Cisplatin drug delivery using gold-coated iron oxide nanoparticles for enhanced tumour targeting with external magnetic fields

Process applications of mid-infrared (MIR) spectrometry may involve replacement of the spectrometer and/or measurement probe, which generally requires a calibration transfer method to maintain the accuracy of analysis. In this study, direct standardisation (DS), piecewise direct standardisation (PDS) and spectral space transformation (SST) were compared for analysis of ternary mixtures of acetone, ethanol and ethyl acetate. Three calibration transfer examples were considered: changing the spectrometer, multiplexing two probes to a spectrometer, and changing the diameter of the attenuated total reflectance (ATR) probe (as might be required when scaling up from lab to process analysis). In each case, DS, PDS and SST improved the accuracy of prediction for the test samples, analysed on a secondary spectrometer-probe combination, using a calibration model developed on the primary system. When the probe diameter was changed, a scaling step was incorporated into SST to compensate for the change in absorbance caused by the difference in ATR crystal size. SST had some advantages over DS and PDS: DS was sensitive to the choice of standardisation samples, and PDS required optimisation of the window size parameter (which also required an extra standardisation sample). SST only required a single parameter to be chosen: the number of principal components, which can be set equal to the number of standardisation samples when a low number of standards (n < 7) are used, which is preferred to minimise the time required to transfer the calibration model.

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Megan R. Holden

Papers

Cisplatin drug delivery using gold-coated iron oxide nanoparticles for enhanced tumour targeting with external magnetic fields

Calibration model transfer in mid-infrared process analysis with in situ attenuated total reflectance immersion probes.