Bioconjugated nanometals and cancer therapy: a pharmaceutical perspective

Conventional cancer chemotherapies are associated with challenges like delivering sub-therapeutic doses to target cells, lack of bioavailability, drug insolubility and nonspecific toxicity to healthy cells. Nanomedicine, an advanced process, can contribute to the development of personalized medicine for diagnosis, therapy and monitoring of cancer. The nanometals enhance drug dissolution and adhesion to targeted tumor surfaces, resulting in rapid onset of effective therapeutic action. Moreover, nanometals can be conjugated with ligands or polymers through a conjugation process, which further leads to enhanced efficiency, target specificity, improved pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of the drug. This review focuses on the applications of conjugated nanometals in cancer therapy, with a special focus on noble and magnetic nanometals.