In our view, the surface engineering of integrated, multifunctional nanobindis offer the potential to shift the current patient care paradigm whereby diagnostics, therapeutics and therapeutic efficacy monitoring are sequential elements of disease treatment. In this example, nanoparticles could be delivered intravascularly using cell specific zip codes, used to visualize diseased tissue by MRI and then to ultimately enable remote, physician-directed drug delivery with minimal collateral tissue exposure and monitoring of its therapeutic efficacy. Instrumentation to apply various remotely tunable sensors and the performance of our remote actuation platform can be improved in the future by new materials and chemistry. Particle cores with mixed polymer matrix shells would result in greater sensing efficiency, requiring a lower particle concentration for release. Despite the many promising avenues of further development presented above, the existing platform presented here allows the ability to remotely trigger release of a biomolecule from the core of a nanoparticle in vivo, thereby validating a ‘modular’ capability that can be adapted to improve the multifunctionality of a plethora of other nanomaterial formulations (e.g., near-infrared heating, radio frequency and other signals).