Nanobiotechnology plays a more and more important role in combating cancer. Ideal drug delivery should maximize drug accumulation at tumors while minimize the unwanted drug exposure to the normal tissues, thus executing cytotoxicity specifically in cancer cells and sparing the healthy cells. Nanotechnology-based targeting delivery has been generally believed as the most promising method to achieve this ultimate goal of pharmacotherapy. Nano drug delivery systems can improve the pharmacokinetics profiles and biodistribution of the antitumor drugs, and enhance the intracellular delivery of the drugs as well. In addition, the drug instability and water insolubility problems can be solved by encapsula-tion into nano carriers.

Recently, professors HUANG Yongzhuo and LI Ya-ping from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (Chinese Academy of Sciences), was invited by the journal Acta Pharmacologica Sinica (APS) to serve as guest editors for a special issue on cancer nanobiotechnology. Experts from Korea, USA, Canada, Singapore, and China, participated in this project. The thematic issue includes 5 reviews and 14 original articles from the above countries, cov-ering a broad spectrum of topics on cancer nanobiotechnology such as targeting drug delivery and functional materials, combination therapy, drug resistance, metastasis, and cancer imaging.

Read full text of this special issue at the publisher’s platform:
http://www.nature.com/aps/journal/v38/n6/index.html

（Credit：XU Jia）