Aim: The identification of novel therapeutics and their delivery systems is essential for strengthening our knowledge and developing more precise and targeted therapies for cancer treatment. This Special Issue intends to highlight novel therapeutic strategies for targeting tumor cells to achieve better treatments.

Dear Colleagues,

Cancer is a leading cause of deaths worldwide and the incidence of this disease are increasing every year. The cancer origin is directly impacted by urbanization, environmental pollutants, chemical carcinogens, unhealthy diets and social habits. Cancer cells appear through a series of genetic and epigenetic changes in which normal cells become cancerous when a series of mutations leads the cell to continue to grow and divide out of control. Gene mutations are the principal cause of the transformation of normal cells to their cancerous forms. Unfortunately, despite decades of active research in the area, successful therapies remain elusive as there are only handful of approved clinically effective drugs available for the treatment of cancer and its metastasis.

Historically, plant-derived agents, such as paclitaxel (Taxol®), vincristine, docetaxel, topotecan, and irinotecan, are among the most effective cancer chemotherapeutics currently available. Nevertheless, most of these therapies have mild to severe side effects due to a lack of tumor targetability and specificity. Ligand-targeted therapeutics could be a successful means of improving the selective toxicity of anticancer drugs. Lately, tumor-targeted drug delivery approaches have attracted extensive attention. Most human tumors overexpress receptors for various molecule such as folic acid and transferrin due to higher requirement for fast growth. The use of such tumor-targeting ligands could enhance the therapeutic efficacy by selectively increasing the uptake of the drug-loaded nano formulations into tumor cells.

The last two decades have witnessed tremendous growth in cancer therapeutics, including novel chemotherapies and gene therapies. The clinical translation of most of the interventions such as chemotherapies, immunotherapies and small interfering RNA (siRNA)-mediated therapies predominantly depends on the tumor targetability and target specificity. In recent times, nanobiotechnology has been widely explored for overcoming several limitations of cancer treatments. Nanoparticles of different origins have been engineered with tumor-targeted ligands to guide therapeutic targets to tumor sites. However, there is no ideal tumor-targeting strategy approved to use in clinic since every invention has its own advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, new inventions highlighting great therapeutic potential and tumor targetability are always in need and demand.

We are pleased to invite you to contribute your original work and up-to-date review articles on tumor-targeted ligands, and novel engineered nanoparticle delivery systems for guiding small molecules and macromolecules towards cancer cells. Additionally, work on natural nanoparticles and exosomes, and detailed toxicity studies on well-established nanoparticle delivery systems are also encouraged.

This Special Issue aims to muster original research and review articles that present newer nanotherapeutics and tumor-targeting drug-delivery approaches for managing various cancers.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. The research areas may include all aspects of cancer therapeutics, exosome-mediated delivery, and their role in cancer therapy/treatment.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Farrukh Aqil
Dr. Raghuram Kandimalla
Dr. Mohammad Asif Sherwani
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cancers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• cancer
• plant therapeutics
• chemopreventive agents
• nanotechnology
• targeted delivery
• oncogenes
• nanobiotechnology
• chemotherapy
• immunotherapy