Today there are many anticancer drugs in the market, which have been recommended at different stages. Camptothecin is the one of the important anticancer drug available in the market.
According to medical practitioners, Camptothecin (CPT) and its derivatives are considered to be among the most effective anticancer drugs of the 21st century. Although studies have demonstrated their effectiveness against various type of carcinomas, application of CPT in humans has only been carried out with CPT derivatives that have improved water solubility.
However, poor solubility of anticancer drugs is one of the major problems in cancer therapy because the drugs require the addition of solvents in order to be easily absorbed into cancer cells. Unfortunately, these solvents not only dilute the potency of the drugs but create toxicity as well. Hence there is a need for a better water soluble drug or it should be target oriented (on cancer cells) one.
Biocompatible systems
A critical obstacle and challenge for cancer therapy is the limited availability of effective biocompatible delivery systems. Since many effective anticancer agents have poor water solubility, the development of novel delivery systems for these molecules without the use of organic solvents has received significant attention.
Recently a research team from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) have successfully developed a method to overcome this drawback by using nanomaterial. This promises to solve the challenge of the poor water solubility of today’s most promising anticancer drugs and thereby increase their effectiveness.
The study was led by Fuyu Tamanoi, UCLA professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics and director of the Jonsson Cancer Center’s Signal Transduction and Therapeutics Program Area, and Jeffrey Zink, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry.
Very soon they are publishing this report in  Nanoscience journal.
This novel approach consists of, using silica-based nanoparticles to deliver the anticancer drug camptothecin and other water-insoluble drugs into human cancer cells.
Tamanoi and Zink devised a method for incorporating the representative hydrophobic anticancer drug camptothecin into the pores of fluorescent mesoporous silica nanoparticles and delivering the particles into a variety of human cancer cells to induce cell death. The results suggest that the mesoporous silica nanoparticles might be used as a vehicle to overcome the insolubility problem of many anticancer drugs.
“The beauty of our findings is that these nanoparticles are biocompatible, contain tubular pores and are relatively easy to modify, Additional modification by attaching a ligand against a cancer-cell-specific receptor can make the nanoparticles recognizable by cancer cells,” adds Zink.
According to Tamoni, Silica nanomaterial shows promise for delivering camptothecin and other water-insoluble drugs. They  have successfully loaded hydrophobic anticancer drugs into mesoporous nanoparticles and delivered them into human cancer cells to induce cell death.
The pores in the nanoparticles could be closed by constructing an appropriate cap structure. This provides the ability to control the release of anticancer drugs by external stimuli.

Reader in Chemistry, Manipal Institute of Technology