Application of Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) technique to elucidate intracellular and In Vivo biofate of nanomedicines

Extensive studies on nanomedicines have been conducted for drug delivery and disease diagnosis (especially for cancer therapy). However, the intracellular and in vivo biofate of nanomedicines, which is significantly associated with their clinical therapeutic effect, is poorly understood at present. This is because of the technical challenges to quantify the disassembly and behaviour of nanomedicines. As a fluorescence- and distance-based approach, the Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) technique is very successful to study the interaction of nanomedicines with biological systems. In this review, principles on how to select a FRET pair and construct FRET-based nanomedicines have been described first, followed by their application to study structural integrity, biodistribution, disassembly kinetics, and elimination of nanomedicines at intracellular and in vivo levels, especially with drug nanocarriers including polymeric micelles, polymeric nanoparticles, and lipid-based nanoparticles. FRET is a powerful tool to reveal changes and interaction of nanoparticles after delivery, which will be very useful to guide future developments of nanomedicine.