The Growing Development of DNA Nanostructures for Potential Healthcare‐Related Applications

Abstract

DNA self‐assembly has proven to be a highly versatile tool for engineering complex and dynamic biocompatible nanostructures from the bottom up with a wide range of potential bioapplications currently being pursued. Primary among these is healthcare, with the goal of developing diagnostic, imaging, and drug delivery devices along with combinatorial theranostic devices. The path to understanding a role for DNA nanotechnology in biomedical sciences is being approached carefully and systematically, starting from analyzing the stability and immune‐stimulatory properties of DNA nanostructures in physiological conditions, to estimating their accessibility and application inside cellular and model animal systems. Much remains to be uncovered but the field continues to show promising results toward developing useful biomedical devices. This review discusses some aspects of DNA nanotechnology that makes it a favorable ingredient for creating nanoscale research and biomedical devices and looks at experiments undertaken to determine its stability in vivo. This is presented in conjugation with examples of state‐of‐the‐art developments in biomolecular sensing, imaging, and drug delivery. Finally, some of the major challenges that warrant the attention of the scientific community are highlighted, in order to advance the field into clinically relevant applications.

Challenges and Perspectives of DNA Nanostructures in Biomedicine

“…[109] Nevertheless,the direct comparison of these results is rather challenging,a sthe amount and size of DN vary from study to study. [110] 4. Strategies and Solutions…”

DNA Microsystems for Biodiagnosis

“…DNA nanotechnology can be perceived as being constituted by two major areas: structural DNA and dynamic DNA [9,97]. More focused reviews on DNA nanotechnology have been reported extensively elsewhere [94,96,98]. In the following, we briefly describe several representative DNA architectures and their primary functional characteristics.…”

Nuclease Degradation Analysis of DNA Nanostructures Using Gel Electrophoresis

“…Recently, the field has moved from proof-of-concept demonstrations of structural design to more application-oriented research. Custom-built DNA nanostructures are now used in applications such as biosensing, molecular computation, biomolecular analysis, enzyme cascades, material organization and drug delivery (Kizer, Linhardt, Chandrasekaran, & Wang, 2019;Mathur & Medintz, 2019;Wang et al, 2018;Xiao et al, 2019). While the functionality and biocompatibility of DNA makes DNA nanostructures useful in such applications, biostability is still a major challenge in the field.…”