Polymeric Nanoparticles in Cancer Therapy

Chemotherapy is the clinical treatment of disease with chemical drugs, and has been researched and performed over several hundreds of years. Compared to surgery, it is regarded as noninvasive, relatively cheaper, easy for public assessment, and less dangerous. However, there are also some risks and side effects when drugs are not localized in the target disease site, but in another normal site, because most drugs can change the biological metabolism even in healthy tissues. Therefore, the efcient and accurate delivery of drugs to the target disease tissue and cells is highly important in chemotherapy. An ideal drug delivery system (DDS) can provide expected clinical outcomes with a minimum amount of drugs so that its efciency is valuable from the economic point of view. In addition, it can reduce the unintended side effect resulting from drug accumulation in normal healthy tissues. To realize this system, many biomedical researchers have made efforts for nding more efcient delivery methods or carriers and optimizing these systems (Xie et al. 2010).