Background: Nanotechnology has emerged as a transformative platform in the pharmaceutical industry, offering innovative solutions to long-standing challenges in disease diagnosis and drug delivery. Operating at the nanoscale (1–100 nm), nanomaterials exhibit unique physicochemical properties—enhanced surface area, improved apparent solubility, quantum-confinement effects, and tunable surface chemistry—that can be strategically exploited to improve therapeutic and diagnostic performance. Objective: This review synthesizes recent advances in nanotechnology-based diagnostic platforms and targeted drug delivery systems, emphasizing their mechanisms, comparative advantages, clinical relevance, and translational limitations. Methods: A structured narrative search was conducted across PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect for records published between January 2010 and December 2025, using Boolean combinations of the terms nanotechnology, nanocarriers, drug delivery, nanodiagnostics, and nanomedicine. Findings: Engineered nanocarriers—liposomes, polymeric nanoparticles, dendrimers, solid lipid nanoparticles, and inorganic nanoparticles—improve biodistribution, protect labile payloads, and enable both passive and ligand-mediated active targeting. In diagnostics, quantum dots, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles, plasmonic gold nanoparticles, and lab-on-a-chip systems deliver picomolar-to-femtomolar sensitivity and support point-of-care testing. Clinically approved products such as Doxil, Abraxane, and lipid-nanoparticle mRNA vaccines demonstrate real-world translation. Conclusions: Although clinical translation remains constrained by toxicity, manufacturing scalability, and evolving regulatory frameworks, nanotechnology continues to underpin the shift toward personalized and precision medicine.
Kshirasagar et al. (Thu,) studied this question.