Foreword

Oncologic drug development focused on single target-single drug strategy for several years. However, cancer cells are genius! They can bypass inhibitor perturbations by using alternative routes. Further, human genome project results indicated that four letter-alphabet is not as simple as central dogma; only few percent of the gene sequences are transcribed and translated. Rest of the genome function is involved in uncharacterized biochemical pathways and cell biology. And epigenetics and metabolites add more complexity to the understanding of molecular mechanisms in detail. This unknown mechanism makes cancer cell genius!!! But a great endeavor of eminent scientists and continuous research to elucidate pathways both in cellular and tissue levels make drug design more effective every day.

To control the effect of several cellular factors, the new trend in contemporary drug design is to employ drug cocktail that will synergistically act on these factors and proper oncologic drug targeting to eliminate off-targeting. For this purpose, nanocarriers have been designed to deliver drugs to tumor microenvironment not only to treat the tumor but prevent its metastasis.

Biomimicking is an old fashioned yet excellent method in disease treatment. Macrophages target cancer cells and using this biomimick bullet macromolecule with oncologic drug cargo serves as a fine treatment strategy. The biomimick bullet cargo can be a wide range of molecules from small to large molecules.

Targeting with nanotheranostic carriers provides specific delivery to cancer microenvironment. However, cancer cells so called “the other strategies” yet to be elucidated. For example, transformation of a healthy cell to cancer cell may enhance inner and surface signaling molecules and may introduce new set of metabolites. Further, some of the non-coding gene’s expression increases during this transformation. Altogether, cellular and tissue level characterization of oncologic pathways may help our understanding of tumor biology. Currently, cancer nanotheranostics tries to find a short cut for experimental and personalized medicine in cancer treatment. This book covers recent advances in this field.