From Prevention to Therapy: A Roadmap of Nanotechnologies to Stay Ahead of Future Pandemics

Several recent viral outbreaks, culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic, have illustrated the need for comprehensive improvement in the detection, control, and treatment of emerging viruses that exhibit the potential to cause epidemics. Nanotechnology approaches have the potential to make major contributions in all these areas. This perspective is intended to outline how nanotechnology can be employed to improve upon respiratory disease detection and containment measures, and therapeutics, with a particular emphasis on applications that can address key areas, including home diagnostics, contact tracing, and the evaluation of durability of vaccine protection over time and against future variants. Nanotechnology offers potent tools to address these needs, but further research is required to validate these applications to address needs of future epidemics.