Emerging strategies for nanomedicine in autoimmunity.

Autoimmune disorders have risen to be among the most prevalent chronic diseases across the globe, affecting approximately 5-7% of the population. As autoimmune diseases steadily rise in prevalence, so do the number of potential therapeutic strategies to combat them. In recent years, fundamental research investigating these autoimmune pathologies has led to the emergence of several cellular targets that provide new therapeutic opportunities. However, key challenges persist in terms of accessing and specifically combating the dysregulated, self-reactive cells while avoiding systemic immune suppression and other off-target effects. Fortunately, the continued advancement of nanomedicines may provide strategies to address these challenges and bring innovative autoimmune therapies to the clinic. Through precise engineering and rational design, nanomedicines can possess a variety of physicochemical properties, surface modifications, and cargos, allowing for specific targeting of powerful therapeutics to pathological cell and organ types. These advances in nanomedicine have been demonstrated in cancer therapies and have the broad potential to advance applications in autoimmune therapies. In this review, we focus on leveraging the power of nanomedicine for prevalent autoimmune disorders throughout the body. We expand on three key areas for the development of autoimmunity therapies - avoiding systemic immunosuppression, balancing interactions with the immune system, and elevating current platforms for delivering complex cargoes - and emphasize how nanomedicine-based strategies can overcome these barriers and enable the development of next-generation, clinically relevant autoimmunity therapies.