Application of Nanodiagnostics in Viral Infectious Diseases

Abstract Molecular tools have played a pivotal role in discovering and characterizing several emerging infectious agents and have now become the gold standard for the diagnosis of infectious diseases caused by fastidious or uncultivable agents. Multiple challenges still remain for the widespread use of cost-effective, validated, and commercially available molecular tools. But molecular diagnostics is an essential part of the development of personalized medicine, which features point-of-care performance of diagnostic procedures. Multiple interrelationships of nanotechnology and molecular diagnostics and their role in nanomedicine as well as personalized medicine were reported. Nanobiotechnologies are being applied to molecular diagnostics, and several technologies are in development, and the use of various nanotechnologies and their applications in life sciences offer new options for clinical diagnostic procedures. Thus nanotechnology can be used to improve polymerase chain reaction (PCR) as well as provide non-PCR methods for rapid diagnostics. Advantages of applying nanotechnology to molecular diagnostics are that only small amounts of sample material are needed and that diagnostic tests that use nanoscale particles as tags or labels are faster and more sensitive. Nanoparticles can also be used to combine diagnostics with therapeutics. The most important clinical applications of currently available nanotechnology are in the areas of biomarker discovery, cancer diagnosis, and detection of infectious microorganisms. Nanomedicine promises to play an important role in the future development of diagnostic and therapeutic methods. In is in this context that we aim to report in this chapter the recent uses of nanotechnologies in terms of diagnosis and prognosis of emerging and remerging diseases.