Nanomedicines: exploring the past, present and future

Nanoparticles, and liposomes in particular, are growing in popularity as drug delivery vehicles for anti-cancer agents and inflammatory disease therapies, as well as forming the basis of a new class of vaccines. They offer a number of advantages in terms of stability, efficacy and off-target effects, but traditional manufacturing methods are labour-intensive, hard to reproduce and difficult to scale up. This has contributed to a widely-held perception in the pharmaceutical industry that nanomedicines are far from clinically practical. A new generation of microfluidic systems is helping to overcome these issues, allowing the rapid development and seamless scale-up of novel nanoparticles. This technology is transforming the development and manufacture of a range of nanoparticle formulations from a hit-and-miss affair into a standardised process, accelerating novel nanomedicines from the bench to the clinic.