Recent advances in nanotechnology based combination drug therapy for skin cancer

Abstract

Skin-cancer (SC) is more common than all other cancers affecting large percentage of the population in the world and is increasing in terms of morbidity and mortality. In the United States, 3million people are affected by SC annually whereas millions of people are affected globally. Melanoma is fifth most common cancer in the United States. SC is commonly occurred in white people as per WHO. SC is divided into two groups, i.e. melanoma and non-melanoma. In the previous two decades, management of cancer remains to be a tough and a challenging task for many scholars. Presently, the treatment protocols are mostly based on surgery and chemo-radiation therapy, which sooner or later harm the unaffected cells too. To reduce these limitations, nano scaled materials and its extensive range may be recognized as the probable carriers for the selective drug delivery in response to cancerous cells. Recently, the nanocarriers based drugs and their combinations were found to be a new and interesting approach of study for the management of skin carcinoma to enhance the effectiveness, to lessen the dose-dependent side effects and to avoid the drug resistance. This review may emphasize on the wide-range of information on nanotechnology-based drugs and their combination with physical techniques.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Nanotechnology
• skin cancer
• drug delivery
• drug resistance
• combination drug delivery
• nanomedicine
• toxicity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

The author (Shweta Kumari), indebted to the financial support from the Department of Biotechnology, New Delhi, India, for project grant (BT/PR18564/BIC/101/452/2016). The author (P. Kesharwani) acknowledges the financial support from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), New Delhi, India, through Extramural Research Grants [35/10/2019-Nano/BMS and 5/13/8/2020/NCD-III].