Nanomedicines and nanomaterials for cancer therapy: Progress, challenge and perspectives

The field of nanomedicines and nanomaterials has been rapidly developing with several considerable breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer. However, some challenges may hinder their clinical translation, such as controversial enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect, potential nanosafety issues, limited large-scale production of nanomedicines with complex prescription. Herein, an overview of currently emerged cancer nanomedicines is summarized, that mainly focus on the recent progress in chemotherapy, phototherapy (photothermal therapy (PTT) and photodynamic therapy (PDT)), radiation therapy, chemodynamic therapy (CDT), immunotherapy (including vaccine delivery) and combined therapy. Furthermore, the exist challenges of cancer nanomedicines are discussed, and several perspectives based on our group's research experience are put forward, including nanomedicines with non-intravenous administration route, enrichment of nanomedicines knowledge repository and advanced strategies (predictive toxicology, high throughput screening, multiomics and cellular pharmacokinetics, data mining, etc.) to achieve the goal of "safe-by-design", and simple component, multimodal theranostic nanosystems to facilitate large-scale production.