Advanced nanomedicine-based therapeutics for targeting airway inflammatory diseases

Airway inflammatory diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer are among the leading causes of worldwide morbidity and mortality, having a huge impact on public health and socioeconomic growth every year. Advancements in medical research have led to the development of various therapeutic agents for the treatment of chronic airway inflammatory diseases. However, the application of these conventional therapeutics is found to be futile as they are only capable of alleviating the symptoms but do not effectively cure or prevent the progression of these diseases. Besides, these agents are also linked with adverse reactions, toxicities, therapeutic resistance, as well as poor delivery that limits their full therapeutic potential. Thus, most patients remain poorly controlled and have a poor quality of life, which necessitated the development of novel strategies to improve therapeutic outcomes in the management of these diseases. In this respect, the application of nanomedicine has gained rising interest as it can achieve targeted drug delivery specifically to diseased lung tissues, to further enhance patient compliance and therapeutic effectiveness of conventional therapeutics while minimizing systemic adverse effects. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the pathogenesis of various chronic airway inflammatory diseases. We also discuss perspectives for the use of nanomedicine-based strategies as advanced therapeutics in the management of chronic airway inflammatory diseases, highlighting some of the most recent studies conducted in this field of research.