Nanomedicine for Treating Diabetic Retinopathy Vascular Degeneration

Abstract

The incidence of diabetes and the pathological conditions associated with chronic hyperglycemia is increasing worldwide. Among them, diabetic retinopathy represents a leading cause of vision loss, causing a significant structural and functional impairment of the retinal and choroidal capillary network. Current therapies include anti-angiogenic and anti-inflammatory drugs administered through repetitive and invasive intraocular injections, and associated with significant adverse effects. The presence of ocular barriers affects the efficiency of topically administered therapeutics for treating the posterior segment of the eye. In this scenario, nanomedicine could improve current therapies for diabetic retinopathy by providing tools that can decrease the number of injections thanks to their controlled release properties, while some materials showed a natural ability to mitigate pathological neo-angiogenesis. Moreover, specific surface modifications could open new scenarios for the development of topical treatments. This review describes current advances in generating nanomedicine for diabetic retinopathy, focusing on the properties of the different materials tested explicitly for this purpose.

Swelling, Rupture and Endosomal Escape of Biological Nanoparticles per se and Those Fused with Liposomes in Acidic Environment

“…[38][39][40]. EVs are under clinical investigation for therapy of autoimmune diseases, in regenerative medicine etc [3,41,42]. However, EVs are hard to manufacture, their production is fraught with low yields of NPs, high heterogeneity, complex isolation, purification and characterization making medical-grade EVs production process to hardly meet the GMP standards, while skyrocketing the costs [12].…”

Swelling, Rupture and Endosomal Escape of Biological Nanoparticles Per Se and Those Fused with Liposomes in Acidic Environment

“…EVs are under clinical investigation for therapy of autoimmune diseases, in regenerative medicine, etc. [3,42,43]. However, EVs are hard to manufacture, and their production is fraught with low yields of NPs, high heterogeneity, complex isolation, purification and characterization, making the medical-grade EV production process hard to meet the GMP's standards while skyrocketing the costs [12].…”

Anticancer Nanotherapeutics in Clinical Trials: The Work behind Clinical Translation of Nanomedicine

“…Unfortunately, while in preclinical settings these technologies provided promising results, their clinical translation was hampered by their high costs of production and sometimes by issues of generating nanoformulations in large scale [ 15 , 16 ]. However, the research in the field is still very active and supported by the exploration of alternative administration routes other than intravenous [ 17 , 18 ] and by the development of other applications, including diagnosis. The goal of this review is to summarize the nanocarriers that reached clinical trial experimentation and some examples to the readers about the characteristics that nanoformulations should have to treat the patients, including their size and targeting mechanism.…”