BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS II: INFLUENCE OF CARBON NANOTUBES IN CANCER THERAPY - Carbon Nanotubes: From Bench Chemistry to Promising Biomedical Applications - page 45

Chapter 3
BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS II: INFLUENCE
OF CARBON NANOTUBES IN CANCER
THERAPY
Chiara Fabbro,* Francesca Maria Toma* and Tatiana Da Ros
Dipartimento di Scienze Farmaceutiche, Università di Trieste, Trieste 34127, Italy
[e-mail]
After cardiovascular pathologies, cancer is one of the most important diseases
and affects a large portion of the western world. The aetiology of this disease,
which is comprehensive and consists of a number of different typologies, is
related to genetic instability and/or multiple DNA alterations. One of the
main problems is to selectively distinguish between healthy and tumour cells.
Considering this aspect, nanotechnology's recent achievements are promising
major breakthroughs in patient care than the current approaches in cancer
treatment. As the U.S. National Cancer Institute states, 1 nanotechnology
offers the unprecedented opportunity of studying normal and cancer cells
in real time, at molecular and cellular scales, and during the earliest stages
of the cancer process. Nanoscale molecular structures are similar in size to
large biomolecules, and under the right conditions they can easily enter cells
or cross blood vessel walls.
3.1 IMPORTANCE OF NANOTECHNOLOGY IN CANCER
THERAPY
The biomedical nanotechnology approach (namely, nanomedicine) can
be really useful in cancer therapy at three different stages of the tumoural
process: early detection, imaging and therapeutic treatment of tumours. 2 For
*These authors contributed equally to this work.