Application of Nanomaterials in Development of Electrochemical Sensors and Drug Delivery Systems for Anticancer Drugs and Cancer Biomarkers

Worldwide occurrence of cancer has initiated a global effort for the development and production of various anticancer drugs. Unfortunately, high potential toxicity and mutagenic and carcinogenic side effects have been reported for most of the anticancer drugs, which cause many problems for the patient even at a slight dosage. Considering this, thanks to their outstanding features such as high sensitivity, selectivity, and cheapness, electrochemical methods have received much attention in the development of quick, precise, and reliable (bio) sensors for the monitoring of anticancer drugs and cancer biomarkers. Here, procedures and approaches presented for the development of modified electrodes based on nanomaterials employed for the anticancer drugs and cancer biomarkers sensing are reviewed. The analytical performance of the constructed electrodes including physical and electrochemical properties together with their figures of merits is highlighted. Nanomaterials offer excellent features for anticancer drugs. They improve multi-drug resistance, site-specificity and enhance efficient delivery. The premature degradation, preventing interaction with biological systems, absorption of the drugs into the selected tissues, controlling of the pharmacokinetic properties and skipping distribution profile can be performed with nanomaterials. In this review, detailed features of nanomaterials in anticancer drug delivery systems will be presented together with the application of nanomaterials in electrochemical sensors.