Nanomedicine for Treatment of Acute Lung Injury and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Sadikot, Ruxana T.; Kolanjiyil, Arun V.; Kleinstreuer, Clement; Rubinstein, Israel

Despite recent advances in diagnostic and therapeutic modalities, acute lung injury (ALI) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) still represent an unmet medical need because of the high morbidity and mortality with substantial medical expenditure [1] [2] [3] . Hence, there is an urgent need to develop novel approaches to treat ARDS. Unfortunately, contemporary drug development approaches to address this challenge have not been rewarding -in particular blockade of single cytokines and chemokines have failed to show an improvement in outcomes because of the complex pathogenesis and nature of the disease [4] . Therefore, defining the contribution of proximal signaling pathways that amplify the inflammatory response and developing targeted therapies to specifically block them is an attractive approach to limit injury and inflammation for this devastating disease [5] . To this end, we have identified several targets that modulate signaling pathways that amplify inflammation and hence are attractive to be tested as potential therapies for ALI and ARDS. However, delivery of peptides, proteins, and silencing RNAs to the lung is an ongoing challenge [6] [7] [8] .