Chiral Nanomaterials for Antiviral Applications, From Direct Viral Inactivation to Immune Modulation

Viral infections persistently threaten public health, and chirality offers a distinctive dimension for the design of antiviral materials. Recently, a series of advances in the use of chiral nanomaterials against viruses, which fall into two major categories. The first is direct antiviral action through chiral recognition, including viral inhibition, agglutination, inactivation, and site-selective cleavage. The second is the modulation of antiviral immunity by chiral nanoadjuvants and nanovaccines. This minireview examines representative recent work along these two lines and discusses the scientific value of each study. Building on this analysis, we present a critical perspective on the common problems of the field. Chiral inorganic nanomaterials lack a defined molecular composition, exhibit pronounced batch-to-batch and within-batch heterogeneity, and possess no metric of chiral strength beyond the ensemble-averaged circular dichroism signal. They therefore fail the fundamental requirement of material certainty in drug development, and their prospects as antiviral drugs are unpromising. Chiral molecular material adjuvants and the chiral retrofitting of aluminum adjuvants embedded in established regulatory frameworks represent relatively feasible translational paths, whereas the more realistic outlet for chiral inorganic nanomaterials lies in active protective equipment, environmental filtration, and agricultural virus control, scenarios in which the material is far less likely to enter human circulation.