Nanotechnology in Early Detection and Treatment of Amyloidosis

Nanotechnology is playing a major role by designing appropriate nanoparticle (NP)-based theranostics that will help to effectively surpass the hurdles faced by old diagnostic and therapeutic strategy, i.e., low detection limit to diagnose monomers and oligomer (main culprit of amyloidosis) of amyloid peptide and inability of drug to cope up with body environment, short life time, and reduced capability to cross blood-brain barrier (BBB). Most prominent amyloidosis-related diseases, i.e., type 2 diabetes (T2D) and Alzheimer disease (AD), are discussed in this chapter. Effects of both diseases are almost irreversible and difficult to diagnose at early stages, making its timely treatment difficult, which will be highlighted in this chapter. Nanotechnology plays a vital role in this context; development of both in vitro and in vivo nanodiagnostic and treatment methods is enabling early diagnosis and up to 10 fg/mL detection limit of AD and T2D biomarkers. Although the role of nanotechnology as nanotheranostics is quite obvious but still some challenges persists that needs to be addressed; e.g., NPs instead of inhibiting amyloidosis process may act as a seed/catalyst and speed up amyloidosis; all these will be discussed in this chapter. Moreover, effect of surface chemistry, size and hydrophobicity of NPs over their interaction with amyloid protein and control of amyloidosis will also be explained in this chapter. Moreover, limited literature is available for using NPs as in vivo nanotheranostics; therefore there is a need to conduct more studies about the use of NPs as in vivo theranostics considering its cytotoxicity and correlation of in vivo and in vitro studies.