Cancer Therapies: Surgery, Radiation, And Chemotherapy

Cancer therapies are currently limited to surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. All three methods risk damage to normal tissues or incomplete eradication of the cancer. Nanotechnology offers the means to aim therapies directly and selectively at cancerous cells. Conventional chemotherapy employs drugs that are known to kill cancer cells effectively. But these cytotoxic drugs kill healthy cells in addition to tumor cells, leading to adverse side effects. Nanoparticles can be used as drug carriers for chemotherapeutics to deliver medication directly to the tumor while sparing healthy tissue. Nanocarriers have several advantages over conventional chemotherapy. They can protect drugs from being degraded in the body before they reach their target, enhance the absorption of drugs into tumors and into the cancerous cells themselves, allow for better control over the timing and distribution of drugs to the tissue, making it easier for oncologists to assess how well they work, and prevent drugs from interacting with normal cells, thus avoiding side effects. Nanoshells can be designed to absorb light of different frequencies, generating heat. Once the cancer cells take up the nanoshells, scientists apply near-infrared light that is absorbed by the nanoshells, creating an intense heat inside the tumor that selectively kills tumor cells without disturbing neighboring healthy cells. …show more content…
After the diagnosis, I have been looking into different treatments and technological advances for