The solid progress of nanomedicine
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The solid progress of nanomedicine João Pedro Martins 1 & José das Neves 2 & María de la Fuente 3 & Christian Celia 4 & Helena Florindo 5 & Nazende Günday-Türeli 6 & Amirali Popat 7 & José Luis Santos 8 & Flávia Sousa 2 & Ruth Schmid 9 & Joy Wolfram 10 & Bruno Sarmento 2 & Hélder A. Santos 1,11
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This commentary article conveys the views of the board of the Nanomedicine and Nanoscale Delivery Focus Group of the Controlled Release Society regarding the decision of the United States National Cancer Institute (NCI) in halting funding for the Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNEs), and the subsequent editorial articles that broadened this discussion. Keywords Nanomedicine . Nanotechnology . Clinical translation . Reproducibility . Cancer therapy
On May 2019, the journal Science reported that the United States National Cancer Institute (NCI) would halt funding for the Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNEs) [1]. This decision of the NCI triggered news headlines and was followed by an impactful commentary piece on nanomedicine, authored by Kinam Park, the former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Controlled Release [2]. Park conveyed that the decision was timely and represented the “beginning of the end” of the nanomedicine hype, laying out a series of arguments to support his statement. In a follow-up letter to the editor of the same journal [3], Piotr Grodzinski explained that the NCI uses a pool of “set aside” funds to support, for a limited period of time, the growth of
emerging fields. This financial support is intended to make the field strong enough and, if worthy of investment, capable of competing via other funding mechanisms [3]. The NCI “set aside” funds supported the CCNEs for 15 years, during which two judicious decisions of renewal were followed by gradual budget cutbacks. The decrease in NCI funding to the CCNEs has been accompanied by a global growth in cancer nanotechnology research, resulting in a more than twofold increase in the number of cancer nanotechnologyrelated grant applications awarded worldwide between 2008 and 2018, as reported by Grodzinski [3]. Now that the field has matured enough, it is time for the anticipated non-renewal of the NCI financial support of the
* Hélder A. Santos [email protected]
5
Research Institute for Medicines (iMed.ULisboa), Faculty of Pharmacy, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
6
MyBiotech GmbH, Industriestr. 1B, 66802 Überherrn, Germany
7
School of Pharmacy, The University of Queensland, Brisbane 4102, Australia
8
Dosage Form Design and Development, AstraZeneca, Gaithersburg, MD, USA
9
Department of Biotechnology and Nanomedicine, SINTEF Industry, Trondheim, Norway
10
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL, USA
11
Helsinki Institute of Life Science (HiLIFE), University of Helsinki, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland
1
Drug Research Program, Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki, FI-0001
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