Behaviors and Persistence of Nanomaterials in Biomedical Applications

Chapter 5Nanomaterials in the Market or in the Way of

In the last decades nanomaterials development have deeply revolutionized the way medicine is intended to be, shifting the therapeutic paradigm to personalized medicine, i.e. precise therapeutic plans tailored on each patient. In the previous chapters, we have discussed the unique benefits brought by nanomaterials to medicine as both therapeutic and diagnostic tools. On one hand, some researchers have focused their work on increasing the complexity of nanomaterials, producing single theranostics able to afford simultaneously multiple diagnostics modalities and controlled therapeutics delivery. Nevertheless, the step from the laboratory bench to the market is not obvious, and it gets harder by increasing the complexity of nanomaterials. Indeed, against the huge amount of published reports regarding nanotheranostics, only about 200 products have been clinically approved or are under clinical investigation [1]. Ideally, approved nanomedicines have been engineered in order to provide higher clinical benefit with respect to the standard-of-care and they had to overcome a series of rigid safety regulations that agencies such as U.S. food and drug administration (FDA) or European medicine agency (EMA) pose to safeguard patients’ health. For instance, most of the clinically available nano-chemotherapeutics yield reduced toxicity and adverse effects with respect to classical drugs rather than increasing their therapeutic efficiency, ...