Nanomedicine in Infectious Diseases: Drug Delivery and Vaccines

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Background

Nanomedicine has made a significant impact on public health applications from developing rapid and portable diagnostics to safer and effective therapeutics for infectious diseases in particular. Recent innovations in nanomedicine have revolutionized almost every medical specialty and significantly contributed to improve the patient’s life. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, nano formulations of mRNA from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have emerged as the most effective vaccines and secured FDA approvals. Nanomedicine has unique diagnostic and therapeutic potential to tackle problems in modern clinical medicine. Using multifunctional agents with programmable properties, nanomedicines are poised to revolutionize treatment strategies. This promise is especially evident when it comes to infectious disease applications, for which the continual emergence, re-emergence, and constant evolution of pathogens has proven difficult to address using only conventional approaches. With the intent to showcase and discuss critical developments in nanomedicine, this Research Topic invites high quality submissions from various disciplines that cover a broad range of applications from diagnostics to therapeutics, delivery of small molecular drugs to biomolecules, including proteins and nucleic acids with a particular focus on infectious diseases.

With lipid membranes playing a critical role in the life cycle of medically important enveloped viruses including HIV, influenza, and Ebola, cellular and viral membrane interfaces are ideal targets to incorporate into broad-spectrum antiviral strategies. Nanomedicine strategies inspired by such lipid membranes have enabled a wide range of opportunities to gain control of critical stages in the virus life cycle either through direct or indirect mechanisms involving membrane interfaces. A greater therapeutic potential can be achieved by enabling new inhibitory functions or improving upon the function of existing drugs by using nanotechnology-driven solutions. Ultimately, clinical translation of nanomedicines for infectious disease applications, especially concerning pharmaceutical drug-discovery pipelines demand new routes of innovation.

This Topic aims to bring the scientific community together on one platform and contribute to the advancement in the field of vaccine, drug therapeutics and development of chimeric mice by better understanding the biology, immunology, and pharmacology underlying infectious diseases. The effective delivery of candidate vaccines of infectious diseases and of drugs to stimulate an immunological cascade at a molecular level is the mainstay of this collection. Authors are requested to showcase their research and achievements related to the delivery of drugs and candidate vaccines that address various still underexplored infectious diseases. The Topic is of interest to those wishing to contribute and disseminate their findings in biomedical research if they explore the mechanisms behind human illness and disease caused by pathogenic microorganisms.

With this Research Topic, we are looking forward to compiling a collection of state-of-the-art research articles on diverse nanoscale carriers and their use in drug and vaccine delivery and on their evolution to overcome challenges associated with factors such as sustained and target specific delivery, stability, durability, efficacy, and bio-distribution. The influence of different host factors such as host metabolic stage and host microbiome on the design and application nanocarriers is also an active area of research that needs to be explored more. The future of medicine is becoming even more personalized and these factors will be significant determinants for effective drug design and vaccine delivery. We welcome the submission of Original Research, Review, Mini-Review, Opinion, Perspective and Clinical Trial articles covering, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Nanoscale carriers in medicine as drug and vaccine delivery vehicle.
• Active targeted drug delivery for microbes.
• Role of nanoscale carriers in drug and vaccine delivery against infectious diseases.
• Selection and design of specific delivery vehicle for specialized cargo such as nucleic acid, toxins, antibodies, drugs, and peptides.
• Influence of delivery methods on biodistribution, efficacy, development of immunity (in the case of vaccines).
• Influence of host microbiome on efficient drug and vaccine delivery.
• Role of nanocarriers in the development of humanized (chimeric) mice to study infectious disease such as malaria and hepatitis.
• Nanocarrier based CRISPR/Cas9 delivery system for gene editing and its applications for developing interventional approaches against infectious diseases.

Keywords: Nanocarrier, Drug delivery, Vaccine, Infectious disease, Malaria, Liposomes, Chimeric mice, Infectious diseases, Immunopathways, CRISPR/Cas9

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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