One of the hardest things about fighting cancer is that drugs often hit healthy cells just as hard as the cancerous cells, causing patients to become sick from the drugs meant to help save them.

As a result researchers constantly search for new ways to increase the safety and efficacy of existing anticancer therapies. Ideally, drugs should target tumor cells while avoiding healthy cells, organs or tissue, and the drug should get to all of the cancer cells within the tumor at doses high enough to kill the cancer cells.

Recent advances in drug delivery and targeted therapies such as targeted nanoparticles have put scientists closer to achieving these goals.

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