Respiratory illnesses are prevalent around the world, and inhalation‐based therapies provide an attractive, noninvasive means of directly delivering therapeutic agents to their site of action to improve treatment efficacy and limit adverse systemic side effects. Recent trends in medicine and nanoscience have prompted the development of inhalable nanomedicines to further enhance effectiveness, patient compliance, and quality of life for people suffering from lung cancer, chronic pulmonary diseases, and tuberculosis. Herein, we discuss recent advancements in the development of inhalable nanomaterial‐based drug delivery systems and analyze several representative systems to illustrate their key design principles that can translate to improved therapeutic efficacy for prevalent respiratory diseases.
This article is categorized under:
Therapeutic Approaches and Drug Discovery > Nanomedicine for Respiratory Disease
Spraying serves as an attractive,
minimally invasive means of administering
hydrogels for localized delivery, particularly due to high-throughput
deposition of therapeutic depots over an entire target site of uneven
surfaces. However, it remains a great challenge to design systems
capable of rapid gelation after shear-thinning during spraying and
adhering to coated tissues in wet, physiological environments. We
report here on the use of a collagen-binding peptide to enable a supramolecular
design of a biocompatible, bioadhesive, and sprayable hydrogel for
sustained release of therapeutics. After spraying, the designed peptide
amphiphile-based supramolecular filaments exhibit fast, physical cross-linking
under physiological conditions. Our ex vivo studies
suggest that the hydrogelator strongly adheres to the wet surfaces
of multiple organs, and the extent of binding to collagen influences
release kinetics from the gel. We envision that the sprayable organ-adhesive
hydrogel can serve to enhance the efficacy of incorporated therapeutics
for many biomedical applications.
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