ABSTRACT
For therapeutic purposes, nano-medicine formulations have been increasingly employed in recent years. In parallel, in the last decade, advances in chemistry, biology, pharmacy, nanotechnology, medicine and imaging, have been developed in which disease diagnosis and therapy are combined. Chapter 9 analyzes the theranostic medicine principles, application and its use in cancer therapies. In this chapter, a brief description of the tumour microenvironment, the cell heterogeneity in tumour and the possibility for developing active-targeting and passive-targeting drug delivery systems for application on cancerous tissues is addressed as an introductory topic. Following the possibility to develop targeting systems is analyzed as one of the strengths of this therapy and, finally, the theranostic medicine principles will be described based on the application of three different sources of stimuli such as light, magnetism, and ultrasound. Through the analysis of selected examples is revealed that multifunctional nanoparticles with combined diagnostic and therapeutic functions show great promise towards personalized nanomedicine, and particularly to the cancer treatment. However, attaining consistently high performance of these functions in vivo in one single nanoconstruct remains extremely challenging and must be the purpose of forthcoming investigations.
