Artificial Intelligence Based Cancer Nanomedicine: Diagnostics, Therapeutics and Bioethics

Clinicians today face challenges in dealing with the complexity of data, as deriving meaningful insights from it requires a lot of time and effort. In this scenario, artificial intelligence (AI) holds tremendous promise. To deal with a large amount of data, AI would certainly offer new ways to provide clinical decision support as well as it will speed up the workflow. Generation of large data through the cancer nanomedicine programme, AI would be of great help to clinicians.

Precision cancer medicine deals with the selection of anticancer drugs for treatment that is appropriate for the tumor's molecular profile and that of the tumor microenvironment. Further, the process of drug development and efficacy analysis becomes tedious with an improved understanding of genetic profile and pattern. In this regard, artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated enormous potential in several areas of the healthcare sector that deal with data analysis and drug discovery. AI has extended towards improving therapeutic efficacy with the integration of AI-based tools into the cancer care regime. Importantly, with the application of AI algorithms, the gene mutations' impact on the sensitivity of chemotherapy or radiation therapy can be predicted. AI-assisted drug identification involving virtual screening of the drug safety and efficacy is relatively cost-effective and time-saving. 

The applications of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology have been increasing in various sectors of society, particularly the pharmaceutical industry. The amalgamation of these two domains is allowing for improved patient data acquisition and the design of nanomaterials for precision cancer medicine. The crosstalk between the tools and techniques utilized in AI could improve the design of nanomedicine by improving material properties and the selection of drug combinations. To this end, this review discusses nanotechnology coupled with AI and its possible applications in the future of precision cancer medicine.

Precise nanomedicine has been extensively explored for efficient cancer imaging and targeted cancer therapy, as evidenced by a few breakthroughs in their preclinical and clinical explorations. Moreover, an amalgamation of artificial intelligence with nanomedicine has proven to be a boon in cancer management. Here, we demonstrate the recent advances in artificial intelligence-based cancer nanomedicine and discuss their structure-function relationship for smart and efficient cancer nanomedicine, including various imaging and therapeutic applications. In particular, the evolving focus, such as tumour incarceration and DNA nanorobot, also highlights a variety of new strategies for advanced cancer nanomedicine. 

To design biomarker diagnostics, unique characteristics of nanotechnology are utilized. For decades, biomarkers have been used in clinical medicine. The use of such high-sensitivity nanosensors will provide patients with an earlier diagnosis of the disease and make major improvements in clinical outcomes. The biomarker profiles taken from tumor samples of patients and the clinical meta data can provide proficient management of cancer patients having comparable molecular subtypes. Thus, artificial intelligence plays a major role in developing advanced diagnostic tools, such as nanosensors, that focus on identifying the complexity of cancer disease diagnosis, thereby emerging as a valuable cancer research outcome in the public domain. This chapter focuses on nanosensors, highlighting their importance for cancer diagnosis applications. 

The growing interest of researchers in artificial intelligence has unvealed its potential applications in disease diagnosis, health monitoring, medical data management, personalised medicine, and drug development. Artificial intelligence and its related technology appear as a promising approach to treat the deadly disease of cancer. Despite the enormous advancement in cancer research, the mortality rate is still very high. Nanomedicine has played a vital role in cancer treatment, and the introduction of artificial intelligence-related technology in nanomedicine increases the hope of advanced cancer treatment and management. Artificial intelligence-enabled nanofabrication techniques, along with a thorough understanding of cancer biology, would enable selective anticancer drug targeting. Altogether, it can be stated that artificial intelligence-based nanomedicine will act as a bridge between translational research and effective clinical outcomes.

Cancer is a deadly and aggressive disease with an abominably low median survival rate. Treatment of the disease is an economic burden long owing to its high recurrence and mortality rates. Metastasis of cancer is one of the reasons for treatment failures, as these metastatic cells are resistant to all types of conventional treatments. Thus early and accurate diagnosis of metastasis is essential to design the course of the treatment regime. Evolutions in statistics and computer engineering over the past decade have encouraged researchers to implement computational methods to analyze the stage and advancement of the disease with precision and accuracy. Furthermore, artificial intelligence (AI), especially machine learning and deep learning, has been implicitly used in medical sectors, including clinical cancer research, in recent years. This article reviews the application of AI to detect cancer metastasis and comprehensively summarizes its advantages.

 As a nanotheranostics platform, therapeutic as well as diagnostic modalities are loaded in a single nanoplatform for the successful development of clinical regimes for treating the various types of cancer. These agents have demonstrated the emergence of advanced platforms that can diagnose cancer at early stages and initiate first-line therapy to monitor it and mitigate necessary treatments for its remission. Recently, computational tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have been implemented for enhancing and improving the simulation and modeling process for nanotherapeutics. These fundamental concepts of AI and ML in cancer therapy and their contributions and promise of nanotechnology coupled with AI for the development of precision medicine for cancer therapy are reviewed in this book chapter and illustrated lucidly. 

Healthcare organisations around the world are dealing with rising costs and the potential for negative consequences. Similar conditions are faced by the public owing to deteriorating ethical standards of healthcare systems. Such situations demand a responsible healthcare scheme that can meet those challenges. All agreed upon the idea that a significant resolution would- be ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI).