What? Nanomedicines are drugs produced with a protective packaging, called a delivery system. The size of these packages is around 100 nanometer, roughly 10.000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.   

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Why? Most drugs spread over the entire body after they have been taken via the mouth or via injection. For many drugs, this results in a therapeutic effect without serious side effects. In other words, a sufficient drug amount reaches the right part of the body to cause a beneficial effect, while the drug exposure to other parts of the body does not cause harmful effects. For example, when we take an aspirin when we have a headache. The relationship between the drug amount (dose) that causes beneficial effects and harmful effects is called the therapeutic index. 

There are certain drugs, such as those used for chemotherapy to treat cancer, that have a narrow therapeutic index. This means that there are small differences between the drug dose that causes therapeutic effects and the dose that causes harmful effects. As chemotherapeutic drugs kill cells, these harmful effects are so substantial that they limit the drug dose that can be given.

Chemotherapeutic drugs are a good example of which medicine types can favor from being packaged in a drug delivery system. Nanomedicines can improve the therapeutic index of a drug when compared to the 'unpackaged' version. This is the result of nanomedicines' improved delivery to tumors and reduced exposure to healthy parts of the body. In this way, therapeutic effects can be improved while side effects are reduced.      

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How? There are various materials that can be used for the development of drug delivery systems and nanomedicines. In my research, I make use of lipids that are similar to components that make up cellular membranes. The advantage of this resemblance is that the lipids can be processed and degraded by the body. I use these lipids to engineer nanosized delivery systems for various drug types, such as chemotherapeutic drugs to improve cancer treatment or nucleic acids for gene therapy.