Nanoparticles: the future for platinum drugs or a research red herring?

Platinum drugs continue to be one of the most effective and prescribed families of agents used in the treatment of human cancers [1]. While there is a continued interest in improving the use of approved drugs for different cancer types and in different drug combinations, the development of new, small molecule platinum drugs is out of favor with drug companies. This feeling is not isolated to platinums, but to all cytotoxics, and the long development times of satraplatin and picoplatin (Pionard, WA, USA) and the failure of BBR3464 have only made this worse. There is now a clear focus internationally on the development of targeted therapeutics for cancer, based on the rapidly increasing knowledge of cancer biology and the identification of target able and drugable cancer proteins [2]. As such, I believe if there is to be a future for platinum drug development then one potential lies in improving the delivery and effectiveness of the already approved platinum drugs: cisplatin, oxaliplatin, heptaplatin and lobaplatin. The focus of this editorial is on the nanoparticle-based delivery of platinum drugs, and whilst this seems the logical next step in platinum development, their commercialization may not be as straight forward as it would be for small molecule platinum drugs, and potentially more risky.