Nanotechnology in Personalized Medicine: A Promising Tool for Alzheimer's Disease Treatment

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a public health priority all over the world. The difficulty of fighting the disease consists mostly in the complexity of symptoms and causes, in the still poor knowledge of its mechanisms and in the existence of a latent, asymptomatic, preclinical stage. Although many drugs are continuously screened in clinical studies for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, the unexpected lack of patient response and sometimes the important adverse effects make it a potential field of application for personalized medicine.

This perspective review proposes nanotechnology as a valuable tool for the application of personalized medicine to AD.

The aim of personalized medicine is the development of more patient-precise treatments based mostly on the knowledge of individual genetics as well as of disease progress, and of pharmacokinetics and metabolic response to available drugs. The optimization of new and more sensitive detection techniques is an important tool for obtaining the pool of data needed for prediction and understanding of patient response.

Research in bionanosensors is already providing examples with high sensitivity for core and new biomarkers for AD. In therapy the functionalization of nanoparticle surface can add specificity for biological recognition or for improving the bioavailability. This would allow the administration of lower doses with less adverse effects due to the local targeting.

Taking into account the promising characteristics of nanoparticles as excellent candidate tools for precision medicine development, the establishment of better standard methods for safety assessment and production scale up would be desirable for the nanomaterial fruitful employment.