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Review
. 2017 Jun;51(2):106-117.
doi: 10.1007/s13139-016-0435-8. Epub 2016 Aug 9.

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

Eun-Mi Kim  1 , Hwan-Jeong Jeong  1
Affiliations
Review

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

Eun-Mi Kim et al. Nucl Med Mol Imaging. 2017 Jun.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Gold nanoparticle; Human clinical trial; Iron oxide; Nanomedicine; Nanotechnology; Quantum dot.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest

Eun-Mi Kim and Hwan-Jeong Jeong declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Ethical Approval

This article does not describe any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

This manuscript has not been published before and is not under consideration for publication anywhere else and has been approved by all the authors.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Schematic illustration of surface plasmon resonance in spherical gold nanoparticles
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Various shapes of gold nanoparticles: a nanosphere, b nanorod, c nanopyramid, d nanostar, e nanocube, f nanocage
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Schematic representations of the internal structure of quantum dots
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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