Radiation-Sensitive Bio Platforms for Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy: Current Status and Future Perspectives

Summary: Cancer is a debilitating disease that affects the quality of life of millions of individuals around the world. Recent advances in designing radiation programmable nanomaterials have shown that they guarantee target specificity and reduce undesirable toxic side-effects in surrounding healthy tissues, meaning that they overcome two major obstacles related to conventional cancer treatment modalities (chemo- and radiotherapy). Moreover, these radiation-responsive nanomaterials (such as nanoparticles, liposomes, DNA nanocages, dendrimers, polysaccharide hydrogel, and gold nanorods, among others) guarantee a spatially and temporally controlled drug (oligonucleotides, radioisotope, radiosensitizer, chemo drugs, monoclonal antibodies, immunoadjuvants, imaging agents) release in the tumor microenvironment. Considering this, these nanoplatforms have gained a considerable attention, since they can be a viable solution to enhance the efficacy of the photothermal and photodynamic therapy in tumor cell ablation.

This Special Issue of Radiation focuses on the latest developments in smart engineered nanoplatforms, namely, those that respond when irradiated at a particular wavelength, which seem to be ideal candidates to deal with a major current challenge in photodynamic and photothermal therapy: the lack of tumor selectivity. This Special Issue, “Radiation-Sensitive Bio Platforms for Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy: Current Status and Future Perspectives”, invites review articles and full-length papers that explore the role of radiation (X-rays, charged particles, visible and ultraviolet radiation), as a physical and specific trigger, to release therapeutic agents at tumor location. Moreover, papers providing new insights into designing new nanoplatforms for accurate tumor localization, thus contributing to the advancement of tumor imaging techniques, are also encouraged.

Dr. Maria Raposo
Dr. Filipa Pires
Guest Editors

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• Electromagnetic radiation
• Radiation therapy
• Oxidative stress
• Biomolecules damage
• Biomaterials science
• Theranostics
• Oncology
• Cell/tissue specificity
• Drug delivery
• Radiosensitization effect
• Photothermal therapy
• Photodynamic therapy