Nanotechnological interventions for the treatment of renal diseases: Current scenario and future prospects

Nanotechnology is one of the emerging field and an important tool for the diagnosis and cure of several diseases. Nanomaterials (NMs), with unique targeting specificities, have already generated a significant amount of interests amongst biomedical researchers. The ease of doing surface functionalization along with convenient encapsulation methodologies for bioactive, make NMs a perfect candidate for drug delivery applications. Kidney diseases are a major health problem throughout the world with more prevalence in developing countries. The major ailments include acute renal injury, chronic kidney disease, renal cancer and end-stage renal disease, having multiple etiologies related to sequential pathophysiological stages. In the past few years, many studies of NMs mainly focused on cancer targeting have accidentally resulted in significant findings related to selective kidney targeting and renal accumulation. Nanotechnological interventions improved drug bioavailability and enabled targeted delivery of drugs to specific tissues, cells, or subcellular compartments. Similarly, NMs based diagnostics with point-of-care solutions have provided early recognition of the specific disease sites with higher resolution and lower limit of detection of the targeted biological analyte. Even after the exponential increase in the funds of nanomedicine research worldwide, reports for treating kidney disorders using NMs, are rather scarce in literature with almost no clinically approved nanoparticles (NPs) available in the market that specifically target the kidney for therapeutic or imaging applications. This paper will review the application of NMs for the treatment of renal diseases and their future prospects.