Innovative approaches for cancer treatment: current perspectives and new challenges

Abstract

Every year, cancer is responsible for millions of deaths worldwide and, even though much progress has been achieved in medicine, there are still many issues that must be addressed in order to improve cancer therapy. For this reason, oncological research is putting a lot of effort towards finding new and efficient therapies which can alleviate critical side effects caused by conventional treatments. Different technologies are currently under evaluation in clinical trials or have been already introduced into clinical practice. While nanomedicine is contributing to the development of biocompatible materials both for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, bioengineering of extracellular vesicles and cells derived from patients has allowed designing ad hoc systems and univocal targeting strategies. In this review, we will provide an in-depth analysis of the most innovative advances in basic and applied cancer research.

Keywords: cancer; extracellular vesicles; gene therapy; immunotherapy; nanomedicine; pathomics; radiomics; targeted therapy; thermal ablation.

Figure 1.. Cancer therapy approaches: The image represents the most innovative strategies to treat cancer, combining different disciplines to obtain the most efficient and personalised therapy for patients.

Figure 2.. Cancer clinical trials. (A): Total number of clinical trials currently registered on www.clinicaltrials.gov for each approach discussed in this review. (B): Number of the clinical trials [in % respect with the total studies shown in (A)] started during the years 2008–2010 (blue) and from 2017 until today (orange). Date accessed: 01/08/19