Nanotechnology-based tools and techniques are rapidly emerging in the fields of medical imaging and targeted drug delivery. Employing constructs such as dendrimers, liposomes, nanoshells, nanotubes, emulsions and quantum dots, these advances lead toward the concept of personalized medicine and the potential for very early, even pre-symptomatic, diagnoses coupled with highly-effective targeted therapy. 

 The overall goal of nanomedicine is the same as it always has been in medicine: to diagnose as accurately and early as possible, to treat as effectively as possible without side effects, and to evaluate the efficacy of treatment non-invasively. The promise that nanotechnology brings is multifaceted, offering not only improvements to current techniques but also providing entirely new tools and capabilities. By manipulating drugs and other materials at the nanometer scale, the fundamental properties and bioactivity of materials can be altered. These tools can permit control over characteristics of drugs or agents such as solubility, blood pool retention times, controlled release over short or long durations, environmentally triggered controlled release or highly specific site-targeted delivery. Furthermore, by using nanometer-sized particles, the increased functional surface area per unit volume can be exploited in various ways.

Combining advances in related fields such as genomics, proteomics, drug delivery and molecular imaging, nanomedicine offers the potential to move from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to one more individually tailored for higher efficacy [1, 7]. For diagnosis, this translates to recognition and characterization of very early (even pre-symptomatic) disease providing assessment, preferably non-invasively, akin to that of immunohistochemistry.

Unfortunately, early diagnosis is futile if not coupled with effective therapy. Owing in part to the national nanotechnology initiatives, there has been much activity in applying nanotechnology to therapeutics [38, 39, 40, 41, 42•]. Currently, there are limited numbers of nanomedical products on the market [2^•], with the majority being pharmaceuticals that are formulated (or re-formulated) into nanosized structures to manipulate the pharmacodynamics, biodistribution and overall effectiveness.

Obviously, not all attempts to apply new nanotechnology approaches in medicine have met with the same success as those cited herein. The new tools are not necessarily intuitive and bring with them new challenges and hurdles. Nanometer-sized structures do not behave in the same predictive ways that single, small-molecule interactions occur.

Nanotechnology, in general, is experiencing a rapid growth period with major advances arriving quickly. Accordingly, these advances are applied in the biomedical field in numerous diverse ways. Already, a few medical products are providing a glimmer of the overwhelming benefits nanomedicine will surely provide. Current preclinical research promises new ways to diagnose disease, to deliver specific therapy, and to monitor the effects acutely and non-invasively.

References: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0958166907000079