Carbon nanotubes in the delivery of anticancer herbal drugs

What is it about?

The demand for herbal compound-based treatment of diseases is gaining vital popularity now a day, and to this, the herbal drug-based treatment strategy for cancer is not an exception. However, non-specific uptake and a wide range of undesired effects are still the major obstacles in their successful clinical translation. At present, the need for a suitable delivery platform that can eradicate these obstacles are under active exploration. The evolution of nanotechnology in medicines has changed the way of delivering drugs and therapeutic moieties. In context, carbon-based nanocarrier also known as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) has emerged as a novel platform for drug delivery due to their high loading and encapsulation efficiency. They possess numerous excellent properties like high thermal and electrical conductivity, high aspect ratio, high tensile strength and high mechanical strength which allowed drug molecules to be loaded inside them to be used as drug delivery vehicle or a device. The most important property of CNTs is their ability to be functionalized with numerous compounds which reduce its toxicity. Herbal based anticancer drugs such as paclitaxel, quercetin, ginsenoside, oridonin, camptothecin analogs, gallic acid derivatives, vinblastine and betulinic acid have been successfully delivered for the treatment of the variety of cancer type using CNTs platform. These herbal products have demonstrated notable improvement in their anticancer potential as supported by various in vitro, ex vivo, preclinical and clinical investigations. The shape of CNTs enables the loading of herbal bioactive inside its tubular architect as well as on its surface while helping their selective intracellular uptake as well as cytosolic release. This article expounds on the perspectives of CNTs based delivery of herbal anticancer bioactive with a cross-talk on the outcomes of these investigations. This manuscript also highlights the ongoing challenges to be overcome for successful clinical translational of CNTs as a delivery vector for herbal therapeutics.

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