Current Status and Future Direction of Nanomedicine: Focus on Advanced Biological and Medical Applications

Nanotechnology is the engineering and manipulation of materials and devices with sizes in the nanometer range. Colloidal gold, iron oxide nanoparticles and quantum dot semiconductor nanocrystals are examples of nanoparticles, with sizes generally ranging from 1 to 20 nm. These nanotechnologies have been researched tremendously in the last decade and this has led to a new area of nanomedicine which is the application of nanotechnology to human health-care for diagnosis, monitoring, treatment, prediction and prevention of diseases. Recently progress has been made in overcoming some of the difficulties in the human use of nanomedicines. In the mid-1990s, Doxil was approved by the FDA, and now various nanoconstructs are on the market and in clinical trials. However, there are many obstacles in the human application of nanomaterials. For translation to clinical use, a detailed understanding is needed of the chemical and physical properties of particles and their pharmacokinetic behavior in the body, including their biodistribution, toxicity, and biocompatibility. In this review, we provide a broad introduction to nanomedicines and discuss the preclinical and clinical trials in which they have been evaluated.