On The Importance of Understanding Biointeractions of Nanomaterials with the Immune System

In this brief editorial we would like to express our opinion on one of the most urgent problems in the field of nanomedicine. A recent review by Weissleder and colleagues nicely summarized this problem in the following paragraph: “Reviewing recent literature reveals a disequilibrium: an exponentially growing number of papers describe the synthesis of new nanomaterials, but relatively few manuscripts comprehensively investigate the biological behavior and/or advantages over existing materials. We clearly need more of the latter. Indeed, an argument could be made that all new nanomaterials should be accompanied by more comprehensive biological profiling, including cytometry analysis of cell distribution and other biological assays”