An Insight into Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles: Ray of Hope for Cancer Management

Cancer is one of the fatal diseases leading to a high mortality rate. The conventional formulations available for the treatment of cancer are associated with several drawbacks. The major ones are increased side effects due to improper tumor selectivity, metastasis of cancer cells and development of multi-drug resistance to available chemotherapeutic drugs. The development of nanobased formulations for the treatment of cancer has been found to be beneficial up to a great extent. Mesoporous Silica nanoparticles are one of the nanotechnology-based formulations that could overcome major disadvantages associated with conventional therapy, such as metastasis, multi-drug resistance and side effects to normal cells. MSN-based nanoformulations could provide dual therapeutic effects against cancer cells. Due to their small size and large surface, which could be functionalized by using different targeting and therapeutic moieties, they provide targeted and enhanced drug delivery. This review highlights Mesoporous silica nanoparticles along with their properties, drug encapsulation and various applications in drug delivery, such as multi-targeting strategy, and multimodal combined therapy by using ultrasound, photodynamic etc. In the future, MSN-based nanomedicines could be used to develop other innovative strategies for cancer treatment.