Foreword

The urgent need to reduce the side effects of drug administration requires to increase the concentration of drug to the targeted body part of interest. The introduction of nanotechnology, which involves creation and utilization of materials, devices or systems on the nanometer scale, allowed to design and develop nanocarriers able to deliver the drug to a target organ, minimizing the drug’s effects on the healthy tissues, thus reducing its side effects. The application of nanotechnology to medicine, designated as nanomedicine has greatly accelerated not only the treatment of many diseases, but also the diagnosis and the imaging. Target-specific drug therapy and methods for early diagnosis of pathologies are the priority research areas where nanotechnology would play a vital role.

However, even with excellent new materials, some questions have to be solved: how to improve a nanocarrier for real applications? What is the state of the art of the research into the drug delivery systems? This e-Book is written with these questions in mind. How nanomaterials are employed in the disease treatment and in diagnostic purposes.

This e-Book edited by Dr. M. Luisa Bondì, Dr. Chiara Botto and Dr. Erika Amore is of interest for not only specialists in pharmaceutical technology, but also graduate students and researchers in materials for drug delivery, biomolecular recognition and medical imaging since “Frontiers in Nanomedicine” links academic knowledge to both research know-how and the avant-garde industrial application of advanced materials for drug delivery systems of industrial application.