Nanoparticles for Effective Combination Therapy of Cancer

Cancer continues to remains a major healthcare problem across the world despite strong translational research efforts towards tackling the disease. Surgery, when possible, along with radiation and chemotherapy continue to remain the mainstay of cancer treatment. Novel targeted therapies or biologics and immunotherapies have recently been approved to improve treatment efficacies while reducing collateral damage to normal, non-cancerous tissues. Combination therapies have shown better results than individual monotherapies in the clinic but often the improvements in therapeutic indices remain marginal, at best. Several combinations treatments have been clinically approved for different types of cancer. Nanomedicine, the application of nanotechnology for medicine, has already made some positive impacts on the clinical care in this fight against cancer. Several nano-sized formulations of conventional chemotherapies have been clinically approved. Nanotechnology provides a novel way to deliver combination therapies with spatiotemporal control over drug release. This review explores the recent advances in nanotechnology-mediated combination treatments against cancer. Multifunctional nanomedicines for mechanism-based combination therapies are likely to deliver the right drugs to the right place at the right time for optimal treatment responses with reduced morbidity. No nanomedicine that combines two or more drugs in a single platform has been approved for clinical use yet. This is because several challenges still remain in the development of nano-combinations including but not limited to - the optimal drug ratios in these nanomedicines, control over these drug ratios over multiple batches, large scale, reproducible manufacturing of these nanomedicines and cost of these nano-combinations among others. These challenges need to be addressed soon using a multidisciplinary approach with collaborations between academia, the pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory bodies involved to ensure that nano-combination therapy delivers on its promise of better treatment outcomes while severely reducing morbidity thus improving the quality of life in cancer patients.