A growing area of medicine looks at how cellular binding observed in nature – where molecules like viruses or proteins bind to specific receptors on a cell – can be mimicked to aid drug delivery.
Those developing targeted drug therapies aim to recreate this precise binding to develop nano-sized drug carriers that attach only to diseased cells.
Once attached, these carriers would release their therapeutic load without affecting healthy cells. If drugs can be specifically targeted in this way, treatments would cause far fewer side effects.
