Behaviors and Persistence of Nanomaterials in Biomedical Applications

Chapter 3Promising Applications in Medicine

Detecting diseases at an early stage and providing a suitable treatment plan is a major challenge in healthcare to enhance patients’ benefits. Development of techniques such as X-ray imaging, NMR, PET and ultrasonography have deeply revolutionized diagnostics, pushing towards non-invasive clinical examinations for diagnoses and disease localization. However, some of these techniques can results in adverse effect, while others are not enough accurate. As an example, imaging techniques based on ionizing radiation can induce damages to fundamental biological macromolecules, such as break in DNA double-strand, resulting in a series of disorders, including cancer. Thus, many efforts are devoted to engineering novel contrast agents, which can provide enhanced diagnostic efficiency with lower radiation doses.

On the other hand, whilst cancer treatments such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy have given renewed hope to oncological patients, the inherent lack of specificity of these techniques is the main cause of the onset of painful side effects and of the reoccurrence of the disease.

The advent of nanotechnology holds the great promise to address these issues. Furthermore, nanomaterials are appealing for combining diagnostics and therapeutics moieties on the same platform (i.e., theranostics). Theranostic agents are all-in-one nanoplatforms that can simultaneously deliver imaging and therapeutic agents to specific sites or organs, enabling ...