Many of the newly developed drugs for cancer, and some of those for cardiovascular disease, are poorly soluble in water and cannot be taken orally. This can be overcome by employing a new and effective delivery system utilizing nanotechnology. We present a new method for oral preparation of poorly soluble drugs that entails assembling (printing) drug-loaded polymeric micelles into sub-100 nm orally acceptable nanorods (NRs). Due to their small size, these NRs will have a high permeability through cells and thus should transport through the intestine to allow for drug delivery in the blood. These NRs drugs are expected to penetrate tumors more efficiently and much faster than individual nanoparticles and may also be useful for drug delivery to atherosclerotic plaque. This should lead to better bioavailability of the drug with reduced toxicity and side effects. Currently used micellar formulations are administered intravenously, which is invasive and could be toxic due to high doses and interaction with normal healthy tissues. Oral drug administration is the easiest and most desirable way to deliver most drugs, including those that are poorly soluble.MDCVJ | XII (3) 2016 158 houstonmethodist.org/debakey-journal absorption, enhance circulation time, avoid immune surveillance mechanisms, and promote delivery to the site of disease. Recent advances in nanotechnology have increased the flexibility of design and enhanced quality control of nanoparticles (NPs) such as nanotubes, NRs, nanowires, nanocages and nanodisks. Among these, NRs attract more attention due to their favorable properties over spherical particles. Ghandehari et al. demonstrated that circulation time of PEGylated NRs is higher than PEGylated gold nanospheres.12 Moreover, NRs were taken up by macrophages to a lesser extent than spherical NPs, which explains their increased circulation time and lower accumulation in the liver compared to spherical particles. Another important finding is that the serum proteins interacted strongly with spherical-shaped particles but not with NRs, which lead to less opsonization and up to 2-fold more tumor accumulation of NRs over spheres. Chauhan et al. compared PEGylated quantum-dot structures of nanospheres and NRs with equal hydrodynamic size and found that both could diffuse through 5-μm pores at the same rate. However, when the pore size decreased to the 100 nm to 400 nm range (the range of pores in tumor vasculature or the neovessels of atherosclerotic plaque), NRs diffused through the pores up to an order of magnitude faster than the nanospheres. Chauhan et al. also showed in vivo that NRs penetrated into the tumors four times as rapidly as the nanospheres. 13 More recently, Dasgupta et al. reported a systematic approach to understanding how the shape of an NP affects its cellular internalization after finding that rod-like particles assumed stable endocytotic states.14 Their summarized data suggests that rod-shaped nanotherapeutics may be far more effective for cancer therapy than currently approved sph...