Cancer is a fatal disease and its prevalence and mortality are rapidly increasing worldwide.
According to the Global Cancer Statistics, approximately 19.3 million new cases and 10 million deaths occurred globally in 2020, because of cancer. The WHO predicts that this trend will increase to 29.5 million new cases and 16.5 million deaths annually till 2040. Effective medical interventions are, therefore, urgently needed to overcome the mortality due to cancer.

Conventional cancer therapies, including chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery, have been successful in improving survival in numerous patients. However, they have limited efficacy in the treatment of advanced metastatic cancers. Conventional chemotherapy is associated with undesirable and sometimes fatal side effects, therefore the site-targeted drug delivery systems are currently the focus of research, as they can minimize the exposure of vital organs to cytotoxic drugs.

Cancer treatments are often hindered by the lack of drug specificity, poor physicochemical properties of the active pharmaceutical ingredients, poor penetration, and drug resistance. With the discovery of an increasing number of cancer types, little improvement in the ability to diagnose, limited treatment options, and poor patient prognosis, it's clear that more advanced technologies are urgently needed.
Nanotechnology can be exploited in biomedicines for applications such as imaging, cell sorting, drug delivery, and targeting. Nanomedicines are particulate in nature and have particle size in the range of 1 x 10-9 m.
The cancer nanomedicines are rapidly becoming one of the leading areas of promise for cancer therapy, and treatments based on the first-generation nanomedicines are available to patients.

With this Research Topic, we are interested in outlining current and prospective strategies in the design of tumor tissue-, cell, and organelle-targeted cancer nanomedicines, and highlighting the latest progress in technologies of tumor targeting to maximize therapeutic outcomes. Research has proved that nanomedicines improve the clinical outcomes of cancer treatment by virtue of modified pharmacokinetics (PK) and biodistributions of the bioactive agents, while reducing their systemic toxicity and adverse effects. Nanoparticle-based drug administration has distinct benefits over conventional drug delivery methods, including greater stability and biocompatibility, increased permeability and retention effect, and precision targeting. These drug-carrier systems have advanced the development of hybrid nanoparticles, which incorporate the combined properties of these types of nanoparticles. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems contribute to the reduction of cancer-related treatment resistance like overexpression of drug efflux transporters, compromised apoptotic pathways, and hypoxic environments. An improved reversal of multidrug resistance may result from the use of nanoparticles that target these pathways. An extensive research is ongoing to target these pathways. Furthermore, researchers have begun to look into how immunotherapy, which is increasingly crucial in the treatment of cancer, uses nanoparticles.

In this collection, we invite articles on nanoparticles for anticancer therapy that can be used to deliver drugs in the contexts of chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and immunotherapy. We also consider the targeting mechanism of nanoparticle-based drug delivery and how it can be used to overcome drug resistance.
This Research Topic invites articles and reviews that encompass the many areas under the nanomedicine umbrella, including diagnostics, drug delivery, and advanced therapies. We welcome original research and review articles covering, but not limited to, the following areas:

- Nanoparticles formulation of anti-cancer drugs and their physicochemical characterization.

- In vitro, in vivo, and in silico evaluation of anticancer nanomedicines.

- Pharmacological assays, pharmacokinetic parameters, and bio-analytical methods applied for the assessment of bioavailability, tissue distribution, clinical trials, and cell line studies of the nanomedicines.

- Anticancer drugs-based nanomedicines like liposome, antibody-drug conjugate, inorganic nanoparticle, polymer nanoparticle, dendrimer, micelle, polymer-drug conjugate, virus-derived vector, nanocrystal, cell-derived carrier, and protein-bound nanoparticle.

- Vaccines for the prophylaxis of cancer and nanomedicines used for the imaging diagnosis of cancer.

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Frontiers in Pharmacology

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