Multifunctional nanostructured materials for multimodal cancer imaging and therapy.

This paper reviews the recent research and development of multifunctional nanostructured materials for multimodal imaging and therapy. The biomedical applications for multifunctional imaging, diagnosis and therapy are discussed for several nanostructured materials such as polymeric nanoparticles, magnetic nanoparticles, gold nanomaterials, carbon materials, quantum dots and silica nanoparticles. Due to the unique features of nanostructured materials including the large surface area, structural diversity, multifunctionality, and long circulation time in blood, these materials have emerged as attractive preferences for optimized therapy. Multimodal imaging can be introduced to nanostructured materials for precise and fast diagnosis of cancer, which overcomes the shortcoming of single-imaging modality. Meanwhile, nanostructured materials can be also used to deliver therapeutic agents to the disease site in order to accomplish multimodal imaging and simultaneous diagnosis and therapy.