Too small to call

Nanomedicine

Source: Scientific American (2009)

If you had a wall in your home that was scraped and dented and full of pin holes what would you do?  You could spend an eternity repairing it hole by hole, dent by dent, filling each imperfection until it was like new again.  On the other hand you could rip down the wall and replace it with a brand new piece of gib. Voila, sorted.

Apply that same analogy to a human body, afflicted with cancerous cells that bind to healthy tissue and choke it like a noxious weed.  What are you going to do now?  Sure, you can cut out the bits you can see, you can swamp the blood stream with a cocktail of chemical poisons that kill the cancer but destroy the immune system in the process.  Or you can blast the affected areas with radiation, causing sometimes dreadful nausea, fatigue and damage to surrounding areas.

None of this is in the least bit satisfactory but it’s the best we can do to save someone’s life – at least it was the best until the brave new dawn of nanotechnology and medicine, or nanomedicine.  Early days yet but research is showing that nanoparticles can deliver minute quantity of drugs, heat or light to each and every cell that needs it, leaving all surrounding cells alone.  No brute force required.

Carbon nanotubes

Nanotechnology is the new frontier where science meets medicine at the molecular level.  Nanomedicine, like all branches of nanotechnology has set the world of innovation alight.  So far we can only glimpse the myriad possibilities where this may go but already we are experiencing significant investment in research and development and an avalanche of applications to protect intellectual property.  There will be huge sums to be made out licensing the techniques to others who can combine the processes into something that will deliver an actual usable product.

Take a crash course in what nanomedicine can offer mankind and prepare to be amazed.

How small is nano sized?

Struggling to get a handle on nano dimensions? Take a look at the graphic below.  A pin head is about 1 million nanometres across.  A red blood cell is 2,500 on the same scale and that's small.  So consider the dimensions of a carbon nanotube - just 2 nanometres.  If you were hoping to see this marvel in action you're going to need something a bit more powerful than that old school microscope.

Source: HowStuffWorks

Some introductory information about nanomedicine

Boston University presentation - Introduction to nanomedicine

Nanomedicine Journal

Nanomedicine - Small particles, big concerns