Cancer is one of the biggest healthcare concerns in our century, a disease whose treatment has become even more difficult following reports of drug-resistant tumors. When this happens, chemotherapy treatments fail or decrease in efficiency, leading to catastrophic consequences to the patient. This discovery, along with the fact that drug resistance limits the efficacy of current treatments, has led to a new wave of discovery for new methods of treatment. The use of nanomedicine has been widely studied in current years as a way to effectively fight drug resistance in cancer. Research in the area of cancer nanotechnology over the past decades has led to tremendous advancement in the synthesis of tailored nanoparticles with targeting ligands that can successfully attach to chemotherapy-resistant cancer by preferentially accumulating within the tumor region through means of active and passive targeting. Consequently, these approaches can reduce the off-target accumulation of their payload and lead to reduced cytotoxicity and better targeting. This review explores some categories of nanocarriers that have been used in the treatment of drug-resistant cancers, including polymeric, viral, lipid-based, metal-based, carbon-based, and magnetic nanocarriers, opening the door for an exciting field of discovery that holds tremendous promise in the treatment of these tumors.

AGH University of Science and Technology Faculty of Materials Science and Ceramics Krakow 30059 Poland

Department of Chemical Engineering Northeastern University Boston MA 02115 USA

Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology Division of Biomedical Sciences School of Medicine College of Health Sciences Mekelle University Mekelle 231 Ethiopia

Department of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology School of Pharmacy Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences Tehran 19919 53381 Iran

Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry Czech Academy of Sciences Prague 16206 Czech Republic

These authors contributed equally to this work

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