Nanomedicines : exploring the past, present and future

Perrie, Yvonne and Ramsay, Euan (2017) Nanomedicines : exploring the past, present and future. Drug Discovery World, 18 (Fall). pp. 17-22. ISSN 1469-4344

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Abstract

Nanoparticles, and liposomes in particular, are growing in popularity as drug delivery vehicles for anti-cancer agents and inflammatory disease therapies, as well as forming the basis of a new class of vaccines. They offer a number of advantages in terms of stability, efficacy and off-target effects, but traditional manufacturing methods are labour-intensive, hard to reproduce and difficult to scale up. This has contributed to a widely-held perception in the pharmaceutical industry that nanomedicines are far from clinically practical. A new generation of microfluidic systems is helping to overcome these issues, allowing the rapid development and seamless scale-up of novel nanoparticles. This technology is transforming the development and manufacture of a range of nanoparticle formulations from a hit-and-miss affair into a standardised process, accelerating novel nanomedicines from the bench to the clinic.