Recent Metal Nanotheranostics for Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy: A Review

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in using nanoparticles in the medical sciences. Today, metal nanoparticles have many applications in medicine for tumor visualization, drug delivery, and early diagnosis, with different modalities such as X-ray imaging, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), etc., and treatment with radiation. This paper reviews recent findings of recent metal nanotheranostics in medical imaging and therapy. The study offers some critical insights into using different types of metal nanoparticles in medicine for cancer detection and treatment purposes. The data of this review study were gathered from multiple scientific citation websites such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science up through the end of January 2023. In the literature, many metal nanoparticles are used for medical applications. However, due to their high abundance, low price, and high performance for visualization and treatment, nanoparticles such as gold, bismuth, tungsten, tantalum, ytterbium, gadolinium, silver, iron, platinum, and lead have been investigated in this review study. This paper has highlighted the importance of gold, gadolinium, and iron-based metal nanoparticles in different forms for tumor visualization and treatment in medical applications due to their ease of functionalization, low toxicity, and superior biocompatibility.