Personalized nanomedicine
Cet article passe en revue les perspectives offertes par les nanotechnologies pour la médecine personnalisée des cancers
Personalized medicine aims to individualize (chemo-) therapeutic interventions on the basis of ex vivo and in vivo information on patient- and disease-specific characteristics. By non-invasively visualizing how well image-guided nanomedicines - i.e. submicrometer-sized drug delivery systems containing both drugs and imaging agents within a single formulation, and designed to more specifically deliver drug molecules to pathological sites - accumulate at the target site, patients likely to respond to nanomedicine-based therapeutic interventions may be preselected. In addition, by longitudinally monitoring how well patients respond to nanomedicine-based therapeutic interventions, drug doses and treatment protocols can be individualized and optimized during follow-up. Furthermore, non-invasive imaging information on the accumulation of nanomedicine formulations in potentially endangered healthy tissues may be used to exclude patients from further treatment. Consequently, combining non-invasive imaging with tumor-targeted drug delivery seems to hold significant potential for personalizing nanomedicine-based (chemo-) therapeutic interventions, to achieve delivery of the right drug to the right location in the right patient at the right time.
Clinical Cancer Research , résumé, 2012