Nanomaterials: Diagnosis and therapeutic properties

Therapeutic strategies toward the treatment of gastrointestinal (GI) malignancies frequently involve the administration of increased dosage of chemotherapeutic drugs, often resulting in nonspecific toxicities. Although conventional radio- and chemotherapy have been the gold standard of cancer therapy for decades, these approaches are not optimal and can lead to resistance to these and other therapies. Effectiveness of GI malignancy therapies depends on fine-tuning of eradication of cancer cells with minimal or ideally no toxic effect on normal cells. Nanomaterials (NMs) offer a solution for targeted killing of cancerous cells without causing damage to the healthy host cells. NMs are appealing drug carriers based on their high tissue permeability, high colloidal stability, small size in the nanometer range, high surface-to-volume ratio (large amount of drug can be loaded), aqueous solubility, ease of characterization, and surface modification. The enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect of NMs permit accumulation at the tumor site. Apart from the passive accumulation of nanoparticles at tumor sites, NMs actively delivered the drug at tumor sites by loading with various growth factor receptors, peptides, shRNA, and small molecules. In this chapter, we will discuss the impact of NMs on tyrosine kinases associated with growth and metastasis of selected GI malignancies.