Published on November 2020 | Herbal Medication, Breast Cancer

From Inception of Herbal Medicine to an Ideal Perception of Therapeutic Agent: Rhododendron as a Therapeutic Agent – A Review

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in women all over the world. Despite advanced treatment modalities, the systemic toxicity remains a major side effect resulting into patient morbidity and mortality despite many technological breakthroughs, even the best breast cancer treatments available today are not 100% effective. Chemotherapy has improved, but many drugs still do not reach the tumor site at effective doses and are often associated with high systemic toxicity and poor pharmacokinetics. Moreover, for many malignancies, diagnosis is obtainable only in metastatic stages of development, reducing the overall effectiveness of treatment. The choice of available treatments depends on tumor characteristics such as biomarkers, tumor size, metastatic disease, ligands, and antigen or endocrine receptor expression. Combined with surgical resection, chemotherapy and radiation remain the first line of treatment for patients with cancer. Even with these treatments, however, cancer continues to have high fatality rates and current therapeutic modalities have yet to significantly improve the often dismal prognosis of this disease. Nanotechnology is a highly focused approach, which may provide more effective and less toxic treatment when compared to chemotherapy. The Nanoparticles (NP) plays a vital role and it can conjugate with various drugs by different methods to deliver drugs to the target site. The NP surface is designed with ligands to get affinity towards specific cells and co-polymers to get protection from immune cells. The nanoparticles conjugated drug can ultimately recognize the site and join to the target and enter to the cell by receptor mediated endocytosis. Then NPs are able to release drugs controllably to cure diseases. Rhododendron is one of the naturally occurring plants which possess various health benefits, such as prevention and treatment of diseases associated with heart, dysentery, diarrhea, detoxification, inflammation, fever, constipation, bronchitis, asthma and cancer.