Cancer detection and treatment has been a challenge for medical science till the years. The ability of cancer cells to multiply quickly and invade other parts of the body by process of metastasis further complicates the situation. Hence prognosis of cancer and its proper treatment also becomes difficult, as invading cells are not easy to detect at initial stages of spreading of infection. This limitation of not being able to detect invading tumor cells can be overcome by applying nanotechnology

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... based approaches. Nanomaterials being very small in size have remarkable properties which are absent in their bulk counterparts. These properties possessed by materials at the nanoscale make them very useful for cancer theranostics. Further nanomaterials are having large number of surface atoms, as well as high surface activity because of high surface area to volume ratio; therefore their surface functionalisation can be done so as to make them useful for diagnosis and treatment of cancer. This could prove to be very promising in the early detection and treatment of cancer.