ACS Nano, 2009, 3 (1), pp 16–20 REVIEW

Impact of Nanotechnology on Drug Delivery

Omid C. Farokhzad†‡* and Robert Langer‡§*

† Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials and Department of Anesthesiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115 ‡ MIT−Harvard Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence § Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Nanotechnology is the engineering and manufacturing of materials at the atomic and molecular scale. In its strictest definition from the National Nanotechnology Initiative, nanotechnology refers to structures roughly in the 1−100 nm size regime in at least one dimension. Despite this size restriction, nanotechnology commonly refers to structures that are up to several hundred nanometers in size and that are developed by top-down or bottom-up engineering of individual components. Herein, we focus on the application of nanotechnology to drug delivery and highlight several areas of opportunity where current and emerging nanotechnologies could enable entirely novel classes of therapeutics.