Title:Recent Advances in Herbal Nanomedicines for Cancer Treatment
Volume: 14
Author(s): Deepak Pradhan, Prativa Biswasroy, Amita Sahu, Dipak K. Sahu, Goutam Ghosh and Goutam Rath*
Affiliation:
- Department of Pharmacognosy, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University), Bhubaneswar, Odisha,India
Keywords:
Herbal anticancer drugs, nanocarriers, nanoemulsions, dendrimers, carbon nanotubes, liposomes, solid lipid nanoparticles,
therapeutic outcomes.
Abstract: Cancer continues to be one of the deadliest diseases that adversely impacts the large population
of the world. A stack of scientific documents reflects a huge number of potent plant-based
anticancer drugs such as curcumin (CUR), podophyllotoxin, camptothecin (CPT), vincristine, vinblastine,
paclitaxel (PTX), etc. that have been integrated into the modern practice of cancer treatment.
The demand for natural products raises exponentially as they are generally considered to be
safe, and devoid of critical toxic effects at the therapeutic dose when compared to their synthetic
counterparts. Despite rising interest towards the potent phytoconstituents, formulation developer
faces various challenges in drug development processes such as poor water solubility, low bioavailability,
marginal permeability, and nonspecific drug delivery at the target site, etc. Further, adverse
drug reaction and multidrug resistance are other critical issues that need to be addressed.
Nanomedicines owing to their unique structural and functional attributes help to fix the above challenges
for improved translational outcomes. This review summarises the prospects and challenges
of a nanotechnology-based drug delivery approach for the delivery of plant-based anticancer drugs.
