The use of nanomaterials in biomedicine has increased over the past 10 years, with many different nanoparticle systems being utilised within the clinical setting. With limited emerging success in clinical...

Following our call to join in the discussion over the suitability of implementing a reporting checklist for bio-nano papers, the community responds. Below we report short extracts highlighting the main messages of the correspondences we received. The interested readers can find the complete pieces in the accompanying Supplementary Information.

Abstract. Natural products have been acknowledged for numerous years as a vital source of active ingredients in therapeutic agents. In particular, the use of active ingredients derived from plants for use in microbial natural products have long been used before the dawn of modern medicine. From ancient times, the efficacy of natural products has been associated with the chemistry, biochemistry and synthetic activities of natural products. Thus, with scientific advancement in modern molecular and cellular biology, analytical chemistry and pharmacology, the unique properties of these natural products are being harnessed in order to exploit the chemical and structural diversity and biodiversity of these types of products in relation to their therapeutic effect. Often, new molecules of interest in drug design units focus on the rearrangement of chemical entities or structural isomers of naturally occurring products in order to generate new molecules; these may be formulated into clinically useful therapies. Contents1. Introduction 2. Sources of drugs 3. Current uses of natural product drugs 4. Natural product drug development 5. Future directions for natural product drug discovery 6. Conclusions IntroductionA natural product is a chemical entity, formed by a naturally occurring living organism with pharmacological properties, which may contribute to vital drug discovery and design. The crude substance extracted from the body of medicinal plants, animals, microbes or microorganism fermentation broths contains unique and structurally diverse chemical components. Natural products have been vital in pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, as a vast range of modern medicines are based upon either naturally occurring molecules, or derivatives of these. Generally, the therapeutic agents that are inhaled, ingested and injected are a mixture of complex therapeutic compounds. Sources of drugsThe complexity of the therapeutic agents depends on the mixture of chemicals prepared synthetically. Therapeutic agents are considered as natural, synthetic, or semi-synthetic dependent on the source from which they were generated (1). The natural environment remains a significant origin of novel therapeutic agent compounds. Natural therapeutic agents are prepared from compounds found occurring in nature, which contain active components in extract form created from sources, including plants, microbes, minerals and animals. The most dominant natural medicine source is plants, due to their chemical and structural diversity and the biodiversity of their components. Examples of medicines that are derived from plants are aspirin (from willow tree bark) (2), digoxin (from the flower, Digitalis lanata) (3) and morphine (from opium) (4). Indeed, it is projected that in the industrialized nation, >60% of all medicines are either natural products or secondary metabolites thereof (5). Although there are challenges from different, novel drug discovery methods, natural products continue to produce additional clinical candidates and medicinal comp...

BackgroundIron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) have increasing applications in biomedicine, however fears over long term stability of polymer coated particles have arisen. Gold coating IONPs results in particles of increased stability and robustness. The unique properties of both the iron oxide (magnetic) and gold (surface plasmon resonance) result in a multimodal platform for use as MRI contrast agents and as a nano-heater.ResultsHere we synthesize IONPs of core diameter 30 nm and gold coat using the seeding method with a poly(ethylenimine) intermediate layer. The final particles were coated in poly(ethylene glycol) to ensure biocompatibility and increase retention times in vivo. The particle coating was monitored using FTIR, PCS, UV–vis absorption, TEM, and EDX. The particles appeared to have little cytotoxic effect when incubated with A375M cells. The resultant hybrid nanoparticles (HNPs) possessed a maximal absorbance at 600 nm. After laser irradiation in agar phantom a ΔT of 32°C was achieved after only 90 s exposure (50 μgmL-1). The HNPs appeared to decrease T2 values in line with previously clinically used MRI contrast agent Feridex®.ConclusionsThe data highlights the potential of these HNPs as dual function MRI contrast agents and nano-heaters for therapies such as cellular hyperthermia or thermo-responsive drug delivery.