A Mini-Review of Magnetic Nanoparticles: Applications in Biomedicine

Recent advances in nanotechnology have rapidly developed new therapeutic and diagnostic concepts in all aspects of medicine. Magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) can be simultaneously functionalized and guided by a magnetic field, thus providing promising tools for several biomedical applications. MNPs contrast agents at low concentrations offer the potential to significantly improve existing methods of cancer diagnosis and treatment. In addition to imaging, MNPs can be designed so that they can selectively accumulate in cancer cells and providing “targeted” treatments that may not be possible with conventional techniques. To this end, MNPs need to have a special surface coating, which causes these materials to be non-toxic, biocompatible and targetable. The treatment of cancer by hyperthermia method could be more effective by using MNPs-based drugs, because they can manipulated under an external magnetic field and increase the efficiency of treatment due to the accumulation of these particles in tumor targets. Therefore development of MNPs could be effective for theragnostics application because they can facilitate the imaging and drug delivery and also could be useful in disease therapy. This Review provides a brief introduction to some of potential applications of magnetic nanoparticles in biomedicine especially in the detection, diagnosis and treatment of malignant tumors.