The Advances of Biomacromolecule-based Nanomedicine in Brain Disease

Brain diseases affect a sizable portion of people in the world. Various treatment modalities have been pursued to control, alleviate, or cure these disorders. Biomacromolecules, e.g., antibody, peptide, enzyme, cytokine, nucleic acid, etc., are one kind of important and promising therapeutic regimens that have forced researchers to make great efforts to realize their clinical applications. However, effective and safe systemic delivery of biomacromolecules into the brain faces diverse challenges such as insufficient drug administration, degradation in the blood, first pass clearance, physical brain barriers, off-target accumulation, immune response, and toxicity to normal tissues. Nanotechnology offers advanced strategies to address these problems through rational design and fabrication of biomacromolecule-loaded nanomedicine. In this chapter, we summarized the administration strategies to the brain and design concepts of various biomacromolecular nanomedicines, highlighted their recent advances in preclinical and clinical studies, and discussed the existing challenges and our perspectives on this field.