Review article
Nanotechnology based drug delivery system: Current strategies and emerging therapeutic potential for medical science

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jddst.2021.102487Get rights and content

Abstract

Nanotechnology or Nano medicine has been identified as the dominant and most commercially invented technology that aims to improve the quality of health care strategies. Although nanotechnology has some limitations, many pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies have already adhered to medical nanotechnology. In some cases, drugs with high toxic potential, such as chemotherapeutic cancer drugs, can be administered with a better safety profile using nanotechnology. It is important to note that Living cells are tiny virtual machines involved in all biological activities, including cell signalling, metabolism, energy generation and nutrient transport. Therefore it can be considered a major candidate technology to deal with biology and medicine for therapeutic purposes. In this review, we discuss the importance of nanoscience with different nanotechnology platforms being used in other aspects of medicine. Besides, we are also addressing the future opportunities of nanotechnology in human health.

Introduction

Nanoscience is the only platform to discover the new properties of matter by collaborating with conventional fields such as applied health, molecular chemistry, molecular science, pharmaceutical science, optics, and even engineering. In the recent few decades, the combination of science and technology are often well architected to defence the challenges in the field of medicinal and health sciences by providing a more effective health system, nano-medicinal tools, and therapeutic approaches. Historically, the term nanotechnology was first time coined in 1974 by Professor N. Taniguchi. Soon after, Drexler developed and published the first concept (Feynman's ideas) of nanotechnology in the book entitled “Vehicles of creation: the arrival of the nanotechnology era” in 1986 [1]. Currently, the impact of nanotechnology on human and animal can be arising new avenue for investigation and transformation of health science and becomes the imperative subject for consideration as a therapeutic tool. Nanotechnology is a very shady multidisciplinary area invented to engineering biological matters such as atoms, molecules, and supramolecules at nanoscale range approx 1–100 nm to hold promise against existing challenges by creating new devices and characterisation of material structure technologies with unique properties to study and understand the lethal biological problems followed by diagnosis and cure of disease [2,3]. Nanotechnology has highlighted as the most dominating and commercially invented technology of these decades, considerably being very crucial for human lives. Of note, living cells component are extremely crucial machinery with very tiny size (nanoscale). They are robustly involved in almost all biological activity, including cell signalling, metabolism, energy production, and nutrient transport. Therefore, it can be deemed that nanotechnology as an essential candidate that can offer new technologies at the individual matter level to deal with biology and medicine for therapeutic purposes [4]. Various nanoscale materials are invented with several clinical advantages; nano-medicine is emerging as a gold standard in health sciences [5,6]. The pathophysiological and clinically correlated modulation of diseased/abnormal tissues/cells offers numerous advantages for producing and delivering several nanomedicine products. Thus, tissue-specific drug targeting approaches may have a choice of strategy to overcome disease prognosis [7]. In the recent few years, nanomaterials, preferentially metal nanoparticles, have received more attention in the diverse area of medical science. Optimising the synthesis of nanomaterials such as polymers, micelles, dendrimers, liposomes, emulsions, nanocapsules, and nanoparticles has now become a prolific area of study.

In the current scenario, nanomedicine is one of the leading applications of nanotechnology, which committed to developing nanoscale medicinal tools to provide an effective health care system. This approach allows us to understand human physiology in a better way to fight against several deadly diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. The significance of nanomedicine is mainly applied for imaging, diagnosis of diseases, tissue engineering, and architecting more efficient, cost-effective and safe drug delivery systems to precisely delivering drugs to target sites which can accelerate treatment outcome via reducing off-target effect and toxicities [8]. According to Bebo et al., to date, approximately 51 nanomedicines have been approved by US-FDA, followed by 77 products are in the pre-clinical stage, of which approx 40% are in the clinical trial phase. Most of these approved nanomaterials are polymeric liposomal and nanocrystal formulations. However, the scientist thinks to develop more efficient material including micelles, protein-based nanoparticles (NPs) as well as a variety of inorganic and metallic particles in clinical trials [9].

Nanotechnology can hold promise to promote revolutionary advances in medicine, communications, genomics, and robotics in human health, which can result in immense clinical benefits. It is very vast and diverse to discuss and explore the whole nanotechnology application. Still, in contrast to this, the most significant advantage of nanotechnology tools and products may have great values in human health in global contexts [10] The history of Evolution Timeline of Nanotechnology in Medical science has been shown in Table 1.

This Review highlights the significance of nanotechnology in human health with particular emphasis on its nano-medicinal application in imaging, screening, diagnosis, targeted drug delivery systems, and effective treatment strategies for human diseases. Here, we also depicted the risk associated with this and its future advancement in medicinal sciences.

Section snippets

Classification of nanotechnology (nanomaterial's/nanoparticles)

Nanoparticles are classified according to their dimensionality, morphology, state, and chemical composition [11]. Nanoparticles are a class of material under nanotechnology containing substances in the form of particle size around 10–100 nm. These materials are broadly divided into various dimensions such as 0D, 1D [12]. According to some finding, these materials, size can influence the physiochemical visualisation (optical properties) of substances like gold (Au), platinum (Pt), silver (Ag),

Application in medicine

The reason why nanotechnology is a promising area in the medicinal field and health care system is merely based on its unique functional characteristics and features to coordinate with our body's natural system. As we well understood that living cells are actually in nanoscale ranges. Therefore it was hypothesized that the nanotechnology world is an attractive field in biology and medicine. Nowadays, the application of nanotechnology in medicine is continually growing day by day due to their

Cancer treatment

Cancer is the leading cause of deaths worldwide. Cancer is believed to be a multi-stage carcinogenesis process involving various physiological cell functions, such as cell signalling and apoptosis, making it the most mysterious and complex disease. Numerous developments have been made in traditional cancer treatment, such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which appear to be far from successful. As it is hindered by some disadvantages such as chemoresistance [[35], [36], [37]] and severe side

Surgical blades

Surgical blades are being used since the awareness of several diseases from the ancient time itself. However, the advancement of surgical equipment is gaining attention due to the modification of the conventional surgical tool. For the progress of the surgical blades, these blades are being coated with a hard metal diamond and gold and other metal and being used. Furthermore, due to metal-coated diamond nanolayer, its properties change to low physical adhesion concerning its tissue, material,

The risk associated with nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is an emerging field of research with a broad spectrum of applications, including human welfare, health care, medicine, etc. Together with these applications, concerns regarding the hazardous effect of these nanoparticles also drew the attention of many researchers and several works was done to analyses the toxicity of these nanoparticles. The conclusion of these researches suggests that nanoparticles' following properties can lead to toxic effects of these particles.

Lungs damage

Inhalation of nanoparticles in any form leads to the passage of these nanoparticles to various organs such as the lungs, brain, liver, spleen, accumulation to the mucosal layers of the epidermis and this invasion results in toxic effects on physiology, for example-TiO2 nanoparticles when exposed to rat model system inferred that the nanoforms of these compound are comparatively more toxic than the bulk material and lead to pulmonary inflammations [124].

Skin damage

Pores present on the skin are another

Limitation of nanomedicine

Nanomedicine is an entirely new genre and very little evidence exists on this genre. We still want to see the useful application of nanomedicine to be on the safe side; we should say it is always at the experimental phase. Due to less information about the disadvantages of nanomedicine, we can not confidently say what the health risks of nanotechnology are. Still, we can conform to the fact that nanoparticles can enter our bodies in many ways, which may give rise to much concern.

Although

Future perspective

The global nanomedicine market size is estimated at $53 billion in 2009 and is projected to increase by 13.5% at the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) to more than $100 billion in 2014. The vision of creating a more efficient system for the development of nano-products is limited. Understanding the biodistribution of nanomaterials within the body is a crucial step. This is linked to a second constraint, which requires imaging methods to investigate nanomedicine's biodistribution over time.

Concluding remarks

At the more visionary end of the scale are the plans for “theranostics,” a fusion of therapy and diagnostics. Nanotechnology has emerged as a new revolution in the field of medical and health sciences. It is an innovative technique used for drug discovery and drug delivery. Applications of nanoparticles are simplistic and successful. Though, the toxicity of nanomaterials is still not well known. A wide variety of nanoparticles and number of contraindications represents one of the major

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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