Editorial: Nanomaterials and multimodal tumor therapy

Nanomaterials and multimodal tumor therapyAlthough cancer treatment has improved dramatically over recent decades, it continues to remain among the most challenging public health issues.Comprehensive cancer management continues to evolve from use of earlier modalities such as surgery, radiotherapy (RT) and chemotherapy (CHT), to increasingly sophisticated approaches incorporating thermal therapy (e.g., photothermal therapy (PTT), magnetic-thermal therapy), dynamic therapy (e.g., photodynamic therapy (PDT), chemodynamic therapy (CDT), sonodynamic therapy (SDT) (1)) and more recently, immunotherapy (2).Such emerging therapies minimize tissue trauma, enhance targeting of malignant cells, reduce systemic side effects and improve patient prognosis.However, monomodal therapeutic strategies that depend on a single mechanism of action are often inherently flawed.For instance, efficacy of thermal ablation by PTT is often lessened by expression of heat shock proteins produced under stress; treatment of deep-tissue tumors is thus often limited by the depth of light penetration.Oxygendependent dynamic therapy, which utilizes oxygen to produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) particularly toxic to cancer cells, is known to exacerbate hypoxia in the tumor microenvironment (TME) and thus exhibit poor efficacy.Similarly, tumor-driven immunosuppression is known to frequently render immunotherapy (IT) ineffective.Development of multimodal tumor therapies is thus urgently warranted.Major advances in nanotechnology have paved the way for the exploitation of multifunctional therapeutic platforms.Elaborate nanoplatforms constructed via drug loading, structure optimization and surface modification, can thus be expected to exhibit efficacious anti-tumor activity.In comparison with monomodal tumor therapy, nanomaterial-based multimodal therapy (Figure 1) possesses major advantages.First, use of multimodal therapy can exert multi-faceted anti-neoplastic effects while minimizing risks of multidrug resistance and Frontiers in Oncology frontiersin.