Acute lung injury (ALI) is a critical illness without effective therapeutic modalities currently. Recent studies indicated potential efficacy of statins for ALI, while high-dose statins was suggested to be significant for attenuating inflammationin vivo. Therefore, a lung-targeted drug delivery system (DDS) delivering simvastatin (SV) for ALI therapy was developed, attempting to improve the disease with a decreased dose and minimize potential adverse effects. SV-loaded nanostructured lipid carriers (SV/NLCs) with different size were prepared primarily. With particle size increasing from 143.7 nm to 337.8 nm, SV/NLCs showed increasing drug-encapsulated efficiency from 66.70% to 91.04%. Although larger SV/NLCs exhibited slowerin vitrocellular uptake by human vascular endothelial cell line EAhy926 at initial stage, whilein vivodistribution demonstrated higher pulmonary accumulation of the larger ones. Thus, the largest size SV/NLCs (337.8 nm) were conjugated with intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1) antibody (anti-ICAM/SV/NLCs) for lung-targeted study. The anti-ICAM/SV/NLCs exhibited ideal lung-targeted characteristic in lipopolysaccharide-induced ALI mice.In vivoi.v. administration of anti-ICAM/SV/NLCs attenuated TNF-α, IL-6 and inflammatory cells infiltration more effectively than free SV or non-targeted SV/NLCs after 48-h administration. Significant histological improvements by anti-ICAM/SV/NLCs were further revealed by H&E stain. Therefore, ICAM-1 antibody-conjugated NLCs may represent a potential lung-targeted DDS contributing to ALI therapy by statins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]