Applications and Challenges of Natural Biomolecules as Drug Delivery Nanostructures in Cancer Treatment

Nowadays, nanostructures have become very important in cancer treatment approaches due to their unique properties. This review aims to investigate nanostructures derived from biomolecules, as a complete understanding of the nanostructure's components helps to design, engineer, and evaluate their performance in the human body. Two key challenges of cancer nanomedicine are 1- designing nanostructures based on the distinct characteristics of tumors by coupling targeted tumor therapies with approaches that precisely target the tumor microenvironment (TME) and 2- determining the biodistribution pattern of drugs by unifying the targeted tumor treatment approaches with related approaches to prescription pathways for specific cancers. These challenges will be reviewed and the ways to deal with them using nanostructures derived from biomolecules will be explained. Finally, barriers that need to be overcome to enable clinical exploitation will be identified. It is hoped that this article will provide valuable information to researchers who are interested in novel methods of cancer treatment.