Functionalized Nanomaterials and Structures for Biomedical Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Nanomedicine encompassing the use of nanotechnology for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases is one of the most exciting and fastest-growing fields in modern healthcare. Systemic administration of bulk drugs suffers from a series of major drawbacks such as poor bioavailability, rapid degradation within the body, improper biodistribution, lack of targeted delivery to injured tissues resulting in important side effects, development of multidrug resistance, and low therapeutic efficacy.

Nanoscale formulations of drugs can circumvent the above disadvantages due to a series of unique features derived from their small dimensions, which are size correlated with the biological systems on which they act. Smart engineering of nano drug delivery systems (NDDS) endows them with multifunctional capabilities such as stealth properties evading the patient immune system and prolonging circulation time, specific ligand-guided drug delivery to targeted diseased areas without damaging healthy tissues, stimuli-responsive drug release allowing specific spatiotemporal controlled release, ability to penetrate cells, ability to improve drug solubilization in biological fluids improving bioavailability, and the ability to modulate drug pharmacokinetics.

Nanotechnology also helps with imagistic diagnosis and clinical analyses. Theranostic nanomedicine uses nano formulations that integrate both drugs and imaging agents into a single platform. Such nano formulations are used for monitoring drug accumulation at the targeted site versus off-target localization (non-invasive monitoring of drug biodistribution, which is in strict correlation with the magnitude of the harmful side effects), for monitoring drug release after intracellular uptake of the nanocarrier, and for assessing therapeutic outcome, for instance, malign tumor regression in cancer disease. Therefore, theranostic nano formulations have a great potential to predict which individual patients have the best chance to respond appropriately to a particular nanomedicine treatment, especially in the case of such a heterogenous disease as cancer. Thus, theranostic nanomedicine broadly opens the way to personalized medicine, shifting the therapeutic paradigm to a more holistic approach of “treating the patient, not just the disease”.

Through appropriate surface or bulk functionalization, the physicochemical and pharmacological features of nanocarriers used for drug delivery and theranostic purposes can be finely tuned, being given a large diversity of molecular and supramolecular structures of such nanovehicles. Lipid-based such as solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs), lipid nanostructured carriers (LNCs), liposomes, and micelles, polymer-based such as self-assembled amphipathic block copolymer micelles, polymeric nanoparticles, and dendrimers are the most used organic nanocarriers. Inorganic nanocarriers include carbon-based materials (carbon nanotubes—CNTs, and graphenes), quantum dots (QDs), metal and metal oxide nanoparticles, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs), and mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNPs). Hybrid organic–inorganic nanocarriers also have great potential in nanomedicine. Functionalized nanomaterials are components in the transducers of diverse biosensors for clinical analyses.

Healthcare-associated (nosocomial) infections (HAIs), most of which are produced by recalcitrant pathogenic biofilms, can be prevented and controlled using smart functionalized nanocoatings which are able to prevent bacteria from settling onto biotic or abiotic surfaces, to kill already settled bacteria or to disrupt the molecular mechanisms and signaling pathways responsible for recalcitrance development. Nevertheless, when it comes to the biomedical application of functionalized nanomaterials, biocompatibility, biodegradability, lack of immunogenicity, and toxicity are primordial importance issues that must be carefully addressed.

The aim of this Special Issue is to highlight the newest and most significant achievements in developing novel functionalized nanomaterials and nanostructures to be applied in the biomedical field.

We kindly invite you to submit a manuscript(s) for this Special Issue. Full papers, communications, and reviews are all welcome.

Dr. Paul Cătălin Balaure
Dr. Alexandru Mihai Grumezescu
Guest Editors

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