Abstract

Cancer alone continues to kill more people than  AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.  According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, there were 12.7 million new cancer cases in 2008. The World Health Organization projects that without major breakthroughs in cancer prevention, discovery of new and accurate diagnostic  modalities and development of highly effective  therapeutic approaches,  the global number of deaths from cancer will increase by nearly 80% by 2030, with most occurring in low- and middle-income countries. There are over 100 pharmaceutical formulations approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to combat this deadly pandemic. Although surgery and radiation treatments are the initial treatments for most cancers, a large number of oncological approaches are being used to control or cure cancer.  Today cancer patients have more choices in which treatment or combination of treatments may be used encompassing three areas of emphasis: (a) Chemotherapy, (b)Hormone therapy; (c) Biological treatment. Despite the currently available choice of established anticancer agents for first-line of activity against cancer, effective delivery of chemotherapeutic, hormonal and biological pharmaceuticals to the tumor tissue and cancer cells selectively continues to be the most vexing problems in cancer oncology. Problems associated with effective delivery of cancer drugs pose severe oncological challenges especially when treating solid tumors (sarcomas, carcinomas, and lymphomas) which account for over 85% of all human cancers. Circumventing these problems is not easy because molecular and cellular biology of neoplastic cells alone has failed to explain the nonuniform uptake of these agents in solid tumors. Repeated delivery of cancer drugs leads to systemic toxicity creating major collateral adverse effects where cancer cells mutate making them resistant to chemotherapeutic treatments.