Nanomedicine: a Giant Leap Forward in Disease Diagnosis & Treatment

One of the most promising applications of nanotechnology is in the field of medicine. Indeed, a whole new field of “nanomedicine” is emerging. Nanomedicine has been defined as the monitoring, repair, construction and control of human biological systems at the molecular level using engineered nano devices and nanostructures. It can also be regarded as another implementation of nanotechnology in the field of medical science and diagnostics. The National Cancer Institute and the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, USA are working to develop nano-sized technologies that can detect, diagnose, and treat disease. Researchers in this field are “confident that they are going to turn healthcare inside out. “Richard Smalley, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist at Rice University, USA, described to the Congress how the potential of nanotechnology can transform medicine: Twenty years from now, nanotechnology will have given us specially engineered drugs that specifically target just the mutant cancer cells in the human body, and leave everything else blissfully alone. Cancer will be a thing of the past. Nanotechnology can be defined as the science and engineering involved in the design, synthesis, characterization, and application of materials and devices whose smallest functional organization in at least one dimension is on the nanometer scale or one billionth of a meter. The prefix “nano” is derived from the Greek word for dwarf. One nanometer (nm) is equal to one-billionth of a meter, or about the width of six carbon atoms or ten water molecules. Current applications of nanotechnology in medicine range from research involving diagnostic devices and drug delivery vehicles to robots that can enter the body and perform specific tasks. In the near future, applications of nano medicine will involve engineered molecules to develop drugs, drug delivery techniques, diagnostics, medical devices and enhanced gene therapy and tissue engineering procedures.