**5.2 Nanophotonics for biotechnology and nanomedicine**

Nanophotonics has a wide range of uses in biomedical science and technology, including nanomedicine applications for light-guided and light-activated treatment, and also studies of the fundamentals of interactions and processes at the single cell/ molecule level. Nanomedicine is a developing discipline that focuses on the use of nanoparticles in the creation of novel noninvasive diagnostics for early disease detection, as well as for promoting selective drug distribution, treatment efficacy, and realtime drug tracking. A thorough understanding of drug–cell interactions, with an emphasis on molecular modifications at the single-cell level caused by the pre-onset state of a disease, can be used to develop "personalized" clinical treatments for disease control focused on molecular identification. Using optical methods, nanophotonics helps one to map drug consumption, clarify the cellular mechanism, and track subsequent cytosolic interactions. For this reason, biosensing, bioimaging, and single-cell biofunction trials utilizing optical probes are particularly beneficial. Light-guided and light-activated treatments have made significant progress in the field of nanomedicine-based molecular disease identification. Nanoparticles are now

*Nanophotonics: Fundamentals, Challenges, Future Prospects and Applied Applications DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98601*

**Table 5.** *A glimpse of optical nanomaterials potential applications.*

equipped with optical probes, advanced carrier groups, and light-activated therapeutic agents capable of guiding the nanoparticles to diseased cells or tissues to allow selective drug delivery and real-time drug efficacy monitoring [6].
