Inorganic nanotheranostic platforms for rapid and reliable molecular profiling of diseases

The prospect of integrating therapeutic, imaging and molecular recognition functionalities promises to improve the efficacy of treatments by combining an understanding of the molecular characteristics of diseases with a targeted therapeutic selection that can be monitored in real-time. This vision can significantly advance the prospects of precision medicine approaches, but it cannot be realized using molecular agents, as building multiple functionality on them is often simply not possible, or occurs at the expense of other functionalities and may require synthetic processes beyond what economically feasible. Nanomaterials on the other hand can be more easily integrated with multiple molecular agents, functionalized with active moieties and assembled into suprastructures, in order to bestow multiple concurrent functionalities across therapeutics and diagnostics. At the simplest level nanomaterials can serve as carriers for multiple agents, each bringing an individual functionality, insuring that they are delivered as a single entity in known relative concentrations. Yet, in more advanced applications, they themselves incorporate functional elements that are expanded and extended by the incorporation of complementary bioactive agents. In this chapter we will review the progresses made towards clinical theranostic application by four widely employed inorganic nanomaterials: iron oxide, gold, silica and porous silicon.