Advantages And Disadvantages Of Nanomedicine

Some new advances in science and technology opens up new opportunities in the fight against cancer, not only to treat the disease, but also to treat many forms of cancer permanently.

Nanotechnology offers enhanced localisation of treatment delivery to brain diseased sites, including hyperthermia, thermal ablation, as well as chemotherapeutic drug delivery and gene therapy. The procedure may also be monitored with various ionising or non-ionising imaging modalities. Theranostics is an emerging medical field that uses nanoparticles for combining diagnosis and treatment on a single nanoscale platform.

Aim 1: Formulate and optimize fluorescently-coated SPIO nanoparticles for cellular uptake by rMSCs. Fluorescently-coated SPIO nanoparticles will be formulated by an existing water-in-oil reverse micelle method protocol [7]. The

Liposomes are site specific drug delivery systems. Change in site specific drug delivery can be achieved by modifying the surface of liposome.

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. As a deadly disease that attacks the human body when some of the body’s cells begin to divide without stopping and spreads to the surrounding area, a definite cure has yet to be found. In 2008 approximately 7.6 million people died of cancer, about 13% of all deaths worldwide. (World Health Organization) The field of oncology, the study and treatment of tumors, continues to grow because of the growing need to find a cure for this brutal disease that claims so many lives. As a terminal disease to the body, there are many different types of cancer so there are also different types of treatment. However, to win the fight against cancer, detection and early treatment are equally vital

The National Institutes of Health began the U.S. National Nanomedicine Initiative program in 2005 by developing a national network of Nanomedicine Development Centers. “The two major goals of NIH Nanomedicine Initiative are: 1) understand how the biological machinery inside living cells is built and operates at the nanoscale and, 2) use this information to re-engineer these structures, develop new technologies that could be applied to treating diseases, and/or leverage the new knowledge to focus work

Herein, we report the PEG-LHRH peptide conjugated mTS-mPAE NPs for the targeted delivery of mTOR siRNA to the lung tumor cells, utilizing bioreducible cationic polymer mPAE based NPs as the delivery carrier. Towards this aim, mTS-mPAE NPs was synthesized using the nanoprecipitation method to encapsulate the mTOR siRNA and form mTS-mPAE NPS. The mTS-mPAE NPs was then conjugated with PEG and PEG-LHRH to form non-targeted(NT-NPs) and targeted (T-NPs) gene delivery system for the treatment of lung cancer. The NT-NPs and the T-NPs of uniform size, zeta potential were produced. The PEG and PEG-LHRH was conjugated on the NP surface by covalent conjugated.

Since last two decades, several versatile drug delivery systems, including liposomes [24], block co-polymers [25], dendrimers [26], inorganic nanomaterials [27], proteins [28] as well as self-assembling small molecules [29] have been extensively studied and developed. Particularly, great interest has been focused on the self-assembling peptides as drug delivery vehicles, because of their good biocompatibility, flexible design, simple synthetic steps as well as facile modification and functionalization [30, 31]. Generally, the self-assembled peptides’ nanoparticles can spontaneously form in aqueous solution or triggered by pH [32], ionic strength [33], enzyme [34, 35] or light [36, 37], temperature [38, 39], driving by non-covalent interactions,

Lastly, Nanotechnology can help doctors find cancer cells in a patient and they have the opportunity to give early medications to the patients diagnosed with cancer. Currently, doctors can use Nanotechnology to detect the minuscule cancer tumors present in millimeters of saliva and blood. As illustrated in the research done by the Stanford University, “We can now detect just a few cancer-associated molecules or circulating tumor cells in the body in just a few milliliters of blood or saliva, or map the boundaries of a brain tumor within millimeters to assess its response to therapy or to plan a surgery,” Rajiv Gambhir said. “We’ve specially designed nanoparticles that can send back a massively amplified, whopping signal when they bind to cancer cells in the colon, and we’re working on ways to trigger the self-assembly of nanoparticles when they enter a cancer cell. The field has advanced tremendously in the past 10 to 15 years” (Gambhir). Therefore, if doctors can detect cancer tumors or cancer cells in the body, then they can offer required diagnostics and early treatment to the patient before the tumor develops and starts to multiply. As shown above, cancer can be detected when it is at an early stage

They also provide a favourable hydrophobic environment to delay the drug release. This characteristic property has been extensively used in the development of sustained release dosage forms like beads, tablets, suspensions, implants. Their hydrophobic properties can also be used for masking the unpalatable taste of certain drugs by hot melt coating. Lipids also offer advantages for preparation of drugs with low melting point or poor compression properties. Development of Lipid-based drug delivery system have been developed over the years, mostly for oral delivery. Formulations can be classified as: • Liquid lipid-based formulations eg. Emulsions or microemulsions (oil/water; water/oil, bicontinuous

There are always pros and cons to everything, especially technological innovations. An example of this can be seen in the second wave of technology according to Alvin Toffler in his book, “The Third Wave”, where everything was used or produced or created in a massive scale –even the infamous weapons of mass destruction. Yes, everything became bigger. Travel was faster. Doing tasks became easier with the help of machines. But of course, there is always another side to things and those are the cons. By producing more stuff, people also craved for more as well. By producing massive amount of things, the resources needed for production were also massive. This demand branched out to more problems. As we can see, technological innovations will not just bring solutions but also problems. That is just the way things work. Nothing’s perfect. It is just a matter of weighing the advantages and the disadvantages of things.

The essence of pharmaceutical treatment is for the administered drug to be present at the site of action in a concentration that exceeds the minimum effective concentration. This is not always the case most times because of some unchallengeable properties of the drug. As a matter of fact, there have been several effective therapies made available for many disease conditions that have failed in their effectiveness because of their inability to reach the site of action. The possible reasons for the poor bioavailability of these drugs at the required site of action include; their inability to permeate biological membranes, poor solubility in water as well as the drugs been rapidly broken down through metabolism and cleared from the body

Among different novel drug delivery systems, phytosomes are well-known as biocompatible nanocarriers that have been used to improve solubility and permeability of different phytopharmaceuticals. They are considered as self-assembled nanocarriers that based on phospholipid complexation approach. This type of complexation involved formation of hydrogen bonding between the polar head of phospholipid and the drug polar moieties. Such bonding imparts phytosomes superior stability profile than other vesicular phospholipid based systems like liposomes. Additionally, phospholipids can promote drug permeation through buccal mucosa by virtue of their solubilizing action as well as their essential role in maintaining cell membrane fluidity. However, up to our knowledge, no study has

Polymer–drug conjugates hold the potential to protect the drug from early degradation, inhibit drug from prematurely release with the biological setting and improve the absorption of the drugs into the tissues (by means of improved permeability and retaining effected or active targeting). Drugs molecules possess the ability to be

Nanotechnology, which is one of the new technologies, is the science and technology of designing, constructing and creating of novel nano-scale structure, 1nm to 100 nm in size, with huger quality, novel performance properties, along with fewer defects compared with those of the bulk material (Siqueira et al., 2010). An increasing interest from the scientific community to work with materials in nano metric scale has been observed since the introduction of the concept of nanotechnology by Richard Feynman in 1959. The last decade has seen advancement in every side of nanotechnology such as nano particles and powders, nano layers and coats, electrical, optic and mechanical nano devices, and nano structured biological materials (Bhattacharyya et al., 2009). Nanoscale structures permit the control of fundamental properties of materials without changing the materials’ chemical status (Murphy et al., 2011).