ABSTRACT
Cancer remains a deleterious disease and global burden, taking many lives. Traditional strategies for tumour diagnosis and therapy have shown remarkable outcomes, including effective tumour inhibition and broad clinical applications while also being faced with numerous limitations that hinder their robust efficiency, such as low drug bioavailability, unsatisfactory targeting potentials and deleterious side effects. The three therapeutic approaches of radiation, chemotherapy and biological therapies are still faced with numerous challenges, including drug resistance and negative side effects and low or no selectivity that limits their efficacy. With the advent of molecular biology and immunity, the use of peptide drugs has gained tremendous momentum and applications due to their unique potential, such as reduced toxicity, enhanced selectivity, low drug–drug interaction and effective biocompatibility. Theranostic nanomaterial, which combines diagnosis and therapy of diseases into one nanosystem, has gained tremendous interest as one of the core game changers in nanomedicine research. It is possible to integrate functional peptides into theranostic nanomaterials and enable them with unique properties to achieve much more complicated biomedical tasks. Peptide-based theranostic nanoplatforms can be designed with specific targeting and efficient imaging potentials, effective transmembrane delivery and enhanced stimulus response. It is possible to encapsulate a number of various anticancer agents into a one-unit theranostics nanoplatform through intelligent design to achieve synergistic cancer diagnosis and therapy. In this chapter, we elucidate the need to develop an efficient delivery system for peptide drugs to fully harness their effectiveness as cancer therapeutics. We outline their incorporation into nanoparticulate platforms for enhanced efficacy and discuss their engineering for targeted and tailor-made theranostics applications for cancer therapy. In a nutshell, peptide-based targeting of nanoplatforms for cancer theranostics represents the next paradigm for research orientation that will stimulate promising therapeutic interventions in the field of cancer treatment.
