The Advances of Carbon Nanotubes in Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), one of the unique one-dimensional nanomaterials, have gained great attention because of their specific characters, versatile functionalization chemistry, and biological compatibility in the past few decades. CNTs can be functionalized via different methods to perform their specific functions. CNTs have been used in various areas of biomedicine as nanocarriers, including cancer diagnosis and therapy. Different molecules such as peptide, antigen, and nucleic acid can be delivered to cancer cells by CNTs with high efficiency. In this review, we summarized the properties of CNTs and the method of CNTs functionalization and illustrated their application in cancer diagnosis and therapy.