Sound understanding of environmental, health and safety, clinical, and market aspects is imperative to clinical translation of nanomedicines

Abstract

Nanotechnology has transformed materials engineering. However, despite much excitement in the scientific community, translation of nanotechnology-based developments has suffered from significant translational gaps, particularly in the field of biomedicine. Of the many concepts investigated, very few have entered routine clinical application. Safety concerns and associated socioeconomic uncertainties, together with the lack of incentives for technology transfer, are undoubtedly imposing significant hurdles to effective clinical translation of potentially game-changing developments. Commercialisation aspects are only rarely considered in the early stages and in many cases, the market is not identified early on in the process, hence precluding market-oriented development. However, methodologies and in-depth understanding of mechanistic processes existing in the environmental, health and safety (EHS) community could be leveraged to accelerate translation. Here, we discuss the most important stepping stones for (nano)medicine development along with a number of suggestions to facilitate future translation.

Keywords:

• Environmental toxicology
• nanomedicine
• risk assessment
• translation
• particle characterisation

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was performed under the EUNCL infrastructure, funded under the grant agreement #654190 of the programme H2020 – INFRAIA of the European Commission as well as the Competence Centre for Materials Science and Technology (CCMX) Project NanoScreen.