New insights into designing hybrid nanoparticles for lung cancer: Diagnosis and treatment

Lung cancer is the foremost reason of death from cancers with broad genetic and epigenetic diversity. Various strategies are clinically available for diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. However, in many cases, the disease is diagnosed after malignancy that reduce the survival rate of lung cancer patients due to unsuccessful response to therapy. With the help of nanotechnology, various nanoparticulate systems including organic, inorganic, metallic, and polymeric nanoparticles have been developed for diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. Each of these nanocarriers possess their own advantages and disadvantages. Combining the organic and inorganic components in a single hybrid nanosystem prepares a new generation of multifunctional nanoparticles with enhanced structural and biological properties. Such nanoparticles not only have beneficial features of all the bulk materials, but also can be tuned in terms of structural and functional moieties to provide carriers with improved diagnostic and therapeutic outcomes. Indeed, hybrid nanoparticles with the ability to incorporate multiple drugs, targeting agents, and photosensitive reagents opened new insights into developing more sensitive and specified systems for diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer compared with conventional nanocarriers. In this review, recent developments in designing different hybrid nanoparticles with diagnostic, therapeutic, and theranostic properties for lung cancer are explained in detail.