Instituto de Nanociencia de Aragon (INA), Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain and CIBER in Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN), Spain.
Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Aragon (ICMA), CSIC-Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain.
Curr Med Chem. 2018;25(35):4602-4615. doi: 10.2174/0929867324666171012112026.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a public health priority all over the world. The difficulty of fighting the disease consists mostly in the complexity of symptoms and causes, in the still poor knowledge of its mechanisms and in the existence of a latent, asymptomatic, preclinical stage. Although many drugs are continuously screened in clinical studies for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, the unexpected lack of patient response and sometimes the important adverse effects make it a potential field of application for personalized medicine.
This perspective review proposes nanotechnology as a valuable tool for the application of personalized medicine to AD.
The aim of personalized medicine is the development of more patient-precise treatments based mostly on the knowledge of individual genetics as well as of disease progress, and of pharmacokinetics and metabolic response to available drugs. The optimization of new and more sensitive detection techniques is an important tool for obtaining the pool of data needed for prediction and understanding of patient response.
Research in bionanosensors is already providing examples with high sensitivity for core and new biomarkers for AD. In therapy the functionalization of nanoparticle surface can add specificity for biological recognition or for improving the bioavailability. This would allow the administration of lower doses with less adverse effects due to the local targeting.
Taking into account the promising characteristics of nanoparticles as excellent candidate tools for precision medicine development, the establishment of better standard methods for safety assessment and production scale up would be desirable for the nanomaterial fruitful employment.
阿尔茨海默病（AD）是全世界的一个公共卫生重点。与该疾病作斗争的困难主要在于症状和病因的复杂性，对其机制的了解仍然有限，以及存在潜在的、无症状的、临床前阶段。尽管有许多药物在临床研究中不断被筛选用于治疗阿尔茨海默病，但患者反应出乎意料地缺乏，有时甚至出现重要的不良反应，这使得个性化医学成为一个潜在的应用领域。
本观点综述提出纳米技术是将个性化医学应用于 AD 的有价值工具。
个性化医学的目标是开发更精确的个体化治疗方法，主要基于个体遗传学以及疾病进展、药代动力学和对现有药物的代谢反应的了解。优化新的、更敏感的检测技术是获得用于预测和理解患者反应所需数据的重要工具。
生物纳米传感器的研究已经为 AD 的核心和新生物标志物提供了高灵敏度的例子。在治疗中，纳米颗粒表面的功能化可以增加生物识别的特异性或提高生物利用度。这将允许由于局部靶向作用而减少不良反应，使用较低剂量。
考虑到纳米颗粒作为精准医学发展的优秀候选工具的有希望的特性，建立更好的安全评估标准方法和生产规模扩大将是纳米材料有益利用的理想选择。
