Recent plant-based nanomedicine and nanocarrier for cancer treatment

Cancer is the world’s most serious health issues. Plants are vast resources of structural varieties and significant sources of novel, therapeutically useful chemical compounds. There are various anticancer drugs and their derivatives that have been derived from the plants, such as podophyllotoxin (teniposide and etoposide), taxanes (docetaxel and paclitaxel), and vinca alkaloids (vinorelbine, vincristine, vindesine, and vinblastine). These compounds have been developed utilizing the data acquired from small molecules and macromolecules. To maximize impact on cancer cells while minimizing injury to normal cells, current therapeutic regimens require selective drug targeting. There are many challenges to deliver drugs into cancer cells that can be addressed by enhancing the drug solubility and stability, increasing the half-lives of drugs, reducing the side as well as adverse effects in nontargeted tissues, and targeting particular cancerous tissues. Therefore, to improve cancer therapy and management, nanotechnology-based modified drug delivery systems have just been created, with promising outcomes. In this chapter, various scientific endeavors and investigations have been discussed regarding the use of plant-derived nanomaterials for the cancer therapy.