Nanotechnology: What it can do for drug delivery.

Every so often, a new term comes along that represents an emerging scientific trend. Biotechnology, genetic engineering, tissue engineering, gene therapy, combinatorial chemistry, high throughput screening, and stem cells are some examples of past terms. Recently, nanotechnology has become a popular term representing the main efforts of the current science and technology. Nanotechnology, which is still not a mature technology and thus, more appropriately called nanoscience, usually refers to research at the scale of 100 nm or less. Nanotechnology is unique in that it represents not just one specific area, but a vast variety of disciplines ranging from basic material science to personal care applications. One of the important areas of nanotechnology is “nanomedicine,” which, according to the National Institute of Health (NIH) Nanomedicine Roadmap Initiative, refers to highly specific medical intervention at the molecular scale for diagnosis, prevention and treatment of diseases [1]. Nanomedicine, like other technologies that have come before it, has incredible potential for revolutionizing the therapeutics and diagnostics under the premise of developing ingenious nanodevices. Drug delivery nanosystems constitute a significant portion of nanomedicine. In drug delivery, however, describing nanotechnology based on a size limit is pointless because the efficiency and usefulness of drug delivery systems are not based only on their sizes. Useful drug delivery systems range from truly nanosystems (e.g., drug–polymer conjugates and polymer micelles) to micro particles in the range of 100 μm. Both nanoand micro scale systems have been extremely important in developing various clinically useful drug delivery systems. For practical reasons, in this perspective, “nanotechnology” includes “micro technology,” and “nanofabrication” or “nanomanufacturing” and its micro counterparts.