Programmed self-assembly and self-organization of carefully designed molecular monomers (Imai et al., 2018) has been widely explored to engineer stable nanostructures with the desired architecture and unique functionality (Lehn, 2015, 2017). This bottom-up approach could not only overcome design barriers associated with traditional molecular manufacturing at the nanoscale, but it could also endow the desired assemblies with adaptability, tunability, and stimuli-responsiveness due to the dynamic nature of the non-covalent interactions holding the architecture together. Hence, these supramolecular architectures may constitute the basis for novel smart nanomaterials with improved properties such as in vitro and in vivo physicochemical stability (Park et al., 2007), efficiency via drug loading improvement (Ahmed et al., 2019), exogenous environment adaptability (Pedersen et al., 2020), higher safety (Martin et al., 2020), manufacturability (Wren et al., 2020), and may have a broad range of applications with various interfaces, i.e., liquid/liquid (Prevot et al., 2018), solid/liquid (Couillaud et al., 2019), and gas/liquid (Manta et al., 2016; Corvis et al., 2018). Indeed, self-assembled systems (Beingessner et al., 2016; Mohamed et al., 2019) have been developed and widely explored in drug delivery (Chen et al., 2011; Song et al., 2011; Desma?le et al., 2012; Mignet et al., 2012; Al Sabbagh et al., 2020), gene delivery (Manta et al., 2017; Do et al., 2019), biomedical engineering (Sun et al., 2012; Childs et al., 2013; Meng et al., 2013; Puzan et al., 2018; Zhou et al., 2020), medicine (Journeay et al., 2008, 2009; Sun et al., 2014), and diagnostics. This body of work has led to the emergence of the field of supramolecular nanomedicine, which is the focus of this Research Topic for Frontiers in Chemistry (Figure 1).
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