What influence does public opinion have on health care policy? Provide a recent (last eight weeks) poll or news article on healthcare policy illustrating the power of public opinion to affect policy.
a nanoparticles, nanocrystals, magnetic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, nanosponges, albumin nanoparticles, fullerene nanoparticles and polymeric nanoparticles[1-4].
Nanotechnology offers many advantages to drug delivery systems and the molecular imaging field as well as having the potential to literally revolutionize both of these fields. In terms of drug delivery systems, liposomes, micelles, dendrimers, and metal colloidals (diameters less than 100 nm) have been extensively studied to enhance the efficacy of therapeutic agents [5-9].
Owing to their small size and excellent biocompatibility, nanosized drug carriers can travel in the bloodstream for a long time, enabling them to reach a target site and effectively deliver therapeutic agents, all the while minimizing the inefficiency and side effects of free drugs.
In spite of the extensive research and success stories with other routes for drug delivery, the oral route is still the most favored route as a result of its convenience, low cost, and high patient compliance compared with numerous further routes. About 90 percent of drug products are administered via the oral route [10]. But, the oral route isn’t the most efficient route for a particular therapy. Novel drug delivery technologies are essential for new biological drugs such as nucleic acids and proteins in order to diminish the possible side effects and attain better patient compliance [11, 12].
The latest advances in nanotechnologies, especially in nanoparticles, make them very promising in the delivery of therapeutics, drug discovery and diagnostics [13].
The delivery of therapeutic compound to the target site is a major trouble in the treatment of various diseases. A conventional application of drugs is characterized by limited effectiveness, poor biodistribution, and lack of selectivity [14]. The nanoparticles (NPs) as drug delivery systems may offer a number of advantages such as protection of drugs against degradation, targeting the drugs to specific sites of action, organ or tissues, and delivery of biological molecules such as proteins, peptides, and oligonucleotides.
Applications of drug nanoparticles include: both biodegradable nanoparticles for systemic drug delivery and nonbiodegradable nanoparticles for drug dissolution modification have been studied [15-18]. Proposed applications for drug nanoparticles vary from drug targeting and delivery [15, 17, 19-23] to even gene [24-26] and protein [27, 28] therapies. Administration of nanoparticles by, for example, parenteral [16] ocular [29-31] , transdermal [32], and oral routes have been studied. However, the oral route is still the most convenient, preferred, and in a lot of cases, also the most cost-effective route of drug administration [28, 33-37].
There is considerable interest in recent years in developing biodegradable nanoparticles as a drug/gene delivery system [25, 38-41]. An ideal drug-delivery system possesses two elements: t
