Functional Biomaterials for Image-Guided Therapeutics of Solid Tumor

Image-guided therapeutic agents show the great potential to facilitate the precise delivery of drugs to tumor tissue/cancer cells along with real-time imaging of therapeutic agents at targeted site. Theranostics biomaterials are becoming popular in field of diagnosis as well as cancer therapy due to their efficient tumor-targeting ability, strong magnetization, and fluorescent properties. In past few years, a variety of image-guided biomaterials have been investigated in biomedical applications specially for cancer therapies that can be classified into two categories organic and inorganic nanomaterials. Inorganic nanomaterials are usually created with inorganic materials such as quantum dot and metal oxides’ NPs, whereas the organic biomaterials’ nanoparticles are created with organic materials including micelles, liposomes, and polymeric NPs via loaded the specific fluorescent dyes or therapeutic agents. This chapter covers fundamental aspects, classification, properties, and biomedical applications of organic and inorganic image-guided biomaterials along with the recent advancements to overcome the limitations of the conventional cancer therapy, clinical status, and future perspective.