Good things, including therapeutics, can come in small packages – and increasingly this means nano-sized packages. For a sense of the scale of these diminutive tools, a strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter.
Nanomedicine offers the promise of drugs that are activated by physiologic stimuli in the body (like the shear stress of blood flow that’s partially blocked by a clot), that can home to very specific targets in the body (like pancreatic islets that are being attacked by the immune system in diabetes) and that carry their own imaging agents – a built-in “metric” to show that they’re working. Biomaterials are being crafted to enhance their properties – like adding gold “nanowires” to heart patches to increase their electrical conductivity.
Vector‘s new sister publication, Innovation Insider, looks at the promise and challenges of nanomedicine – both technical and regulatory. Read more about nanoscissors, theranostics, quantum dots and how the future is nano.
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