Safety and Environmental Risks in Medical Applications of Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology has developed as a revolutionary platform in the current medical practice, which has allowed novel methods to detect a disease, targeted therapy, and customized health care. Through the utilization of physicochemical characteristics on a nanoscale, nanotechnology-based medical products provide higher bioavailability, controlled drug delivery, and high therapeutic efficacy levels than traditional systems. Nevertheless, the same characteristics that make them have those benefits also pose significant safety and environmental issues, which should be tackled with care to provide responsible clinical translation. This chapter gives a critical assessment of the safety and environmental hazards of medical uses of nanotechnology. It discusses the effect of the physicochemical characteristics of nanoparticles on biological interactions, biodistribution, and toxicity, and focuses specifically on organ-specific toxicity, immunological responses, genotoxicity, and long-term health effects. The major nanotoxicological processes, such as oxidative stress, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and the cell death pathway, are also analyzed. Also, the chapter points out the environmental fate and ecotoxicological consequences of medical nanomaterials released during the manufacturing process, clinical use, disposal, and excretion in patients. Problems of regulation, ethics, and risk evaluation are also discussed with special attention to the shortcomings of traditional models when used to address the nanoscale systems. The chapter goes further to discuss the safe-by-design strategies, life-cycle assessment methods, and predictive toxicology tools as viable ways to reduce risks. Overall, this chapter highlights the need to incorporate safety, environmental sustainability, and ethical aspects of nanomedicine development to ensure safe and sustainable development of nanomedicine in the medical sector.