Chemotherapy remains one of the most prevailing regimens hitherto in the fight against
cancer, but its development has been being suffering from various fatal side effects associated with the non-specific toxicity of common chemical drugs. Advances in biomedical application of nanomedicine have been providing alternative but promising approaches for
cancer therapy, by leveraging its excellent intrinsic physicochemical properties to address these critical concerns. In particular, nanomedicine-enabled
chemotherapy has been established as a safer and promising therapeutic modality, especially the recently proposed nanocatalytic medicine featuring the capabilities to generate toxic substances by initiating diverse catalytic reactions within the
tumor without directly relying on highly toxic but non-selective chemotherapeutic agents. Of special note, under exogenous/endogenous stimulations, nanomedicine can serve as a versatile platform that allows additional therapeutic modalities (
photothermal therapy (PTT),
photodynamic therapy (
PDT), chemodynamic
therapy (CDT), etc.) to be seamlessly integrated with
chemotherapy for efficacious synergistic treatments of
tumors. Here, we comprehensively review and summarize the representative studies of multimodal synergistic
cancer treatments derived from nanomedicine and nanocatalytic medicine-enabled
chemotherapy in recent years, and their underlying mechanisms are also presented in detail. A number of existing challenges and further perspectives for nanomedicine-synergized
chemotherapy for malignant solid
tumor treatments are also highlighted for understanding this booming research area as comprehensively as possible.