Introduction

One of the greatest advantages of delivering therapeutics through the blood stream is that blood goes everywhere. Therefore, the medicine will reach the entire body, carried by blood through the circulation system. However, cancer therapeutics are often toxic agents that are designed to disrupt cellular processes in order to kill cancer cells. It is therefore undesirable to have these toxic agents all over the patients’ body. In fact, much of the side-effects of chemotherapy are due to the cancer medication affecting the body’s normal functions.

Targeted delivery schemes aims to solve this problem by devising methods that will selectively accumulate the drug at the site of cancer. This will have a variety of benefits including more effective treatment, decreased side-effects and lowered dosage.

Solutions

A variety of methods has been developed to selectively delivery the drugs to the tumors. The first method is to target cancer specific markers that are displayed on cancer and cancer-related cells. The second is to use molecules that are more actively uptaken by the tumor.

Click on the pictures below to find out more about each method.