Cancer is one of the most serious health threats worldwide. Personalized oncology holds potential for future
cancer care in clinical practice, where each patient could be delivered
individualized medicine on the basis of key
biological features of an individual
tumor. One of the most urgent problems is to develop novel approaches that incorporate the increasing molecular information into the understanding of
cancer biological behaviors for personalized oncology.
Quantum dots are a heterogeneous class of engineered fluorescent nanoparticles with unique optical and chemical properties, which make them promising platforms for biomedical applications. With the unique optical properties, the utilization of
quantum dot-based nanotechnology has been expanded into a wide variety of attractive biomedical applications for
cancer diagnosis, monitoring, pathogenesis, treatment, molecular pathology and heterogeneity in combination with
cancer biomarkers. Here, we focus on the clinical application of
quantum dot-based nanotechnology in personalized oncology, covering topics on individualized
cancer diagnosis and treatment by in vitro and in vivo molecular imaging technologies, and in-depth understanding of the
biological behaviors of
tumors from a nanotechnology perspective. In addition, the major challenges in translating
quantum dot-based nanotechnology into clinical application and promising future directions in personalized oncology are also discussed.