Nanomedicines for the delivery of glucocorticoids and nucleic acids as potential alternatives in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease that affects 0.5-1% of the world population. Current treatments include on one hand non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and glucocorticoids (GCs) for treating pain and on the other hand disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs such as methotrexate, Janus kinase inhibitors or biologics such as antibodies targeting mainly cytokine expression. More recently, nucleic acids such as siRNA, miRNA, or anti-miRNA have shown strong potentialities for the treatment of RA. This review discusses the way nanomedicines can target GCs and nucleic acids to inflammatory sites, increase drug penetration within inflammatory cells, achieve better subcellular distribution and finally protect drugs against degradation. For GCs such a targeting effect would allow the treatment to be more effective at lower doses and to reduce the administration frequency as well as to induce much fewer side-effects. In the case of nucleic acids, particularly siRNA, knocking down proteins involved in RA, could importantly be facilitated using nanomedicines. Finally, the combination of both siRNA and GCs in the same carrier allowed for the same cell to target both the GCs receptor as well as any other signaling pathway involved in RA. Nanomedicines appear to be very promising for the delivery of conventional and novel drugs in RA therapeutics. This article is categorized under: Therapeutic Approaches and Drug Discovery > Emerging Technologies Biology-Inspired Nanomaterials > Nucleic Acid-Based Structures.