How is nanotechnology used in medicine? Currently, nanotechnology is used to deliver drugs, improve diagnostics, and help regenerate after illness or surgery. Modern technology is still limited, and the future of nanotechnology could bring an amazing revolution in medicine. Let’s look at what nanotechnology is, how it is currently used, and how it could be used in the future.
Nanotechnology is anything between 1 and 100 nanometers that we can use for our own purposes. It doesn’t necessarily mean tiny robots, although nanotechnology can make use of microchips and nano machinery. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, one ten millionth of a centimeter, and one millionth of a millimeter. To give you some idea of how small that is, the average human hair is 100,000 nanometers wide. A bacterium is roughly 2,500 nanometers long. DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter. A gold atom is 0.3 nanometers. So, nanotechnology deals with things that are not visible to the human eye. Even regular microscopes can’t see things that small. Electron microscopes, scanning tunneling microscopes, and atomic force microscopes can. The invention of these has made nanotechnology possible. Nanotechnology means manipulating things on a molecular scale and making minuscule collections of molecules. This gives scientists the ability to dictate what those molecules will do and design them for a specific purpose. There is some worry about what manmade molecules at this size will do, but there is no way of knowing yet.
So, how is nanotechnology used in medicine at the moment? The first way is to deliver drugs efficiently. If you need to take drugs, you can either take a pill or have an injection. Either way, the drug will end up in your bloodstream and travel around your body. Some of it will go to where it is meant to, but a lot will miss and will just be cleared out of the body. Nanotechnology can be used to target specific locations in the body. These drug release systems can be made to have low solubility, so they don’t dissolve until they reach their optimal location. They can be created to make the body use the nanoparticles to make its own drugs. They could be designed, for example, to target cancer cells, which are hard to target because they are the same as the other cells in the body. This targeting and delayed release means that drugs will be less toxic and there will be fewer side effects.
Nanotechnology is being used to diagnose illness in the body. Nanotechnology is mostly being used to diagnose cancer, but it can be used to diagnose many different diseases. Nanoparticles are very small, obviously, which means they have a high surface area to volume ratio. They can be designed to pick up molecules from cancers and tumors in the body, giving information about what type of cancer is forming and how developed it is. They can also be used to stick to the cancer to aid imaging technology, such as CT scans. This helps the doctors to see exactly where the cancer is. They can also show how well chemotherapy or radiation therapy are doing.
Nanotechnology is also being used to help people recover after surgery or injury. They can be used to help bone or soft tissue regenerate. Nanoparticles can be built that are very similar to the structure of bone. When they are inserted into the body, they latch onto broken bones or places where bone isn’t growing and encourage the bone to grow. In elderly people, or people with degenerative bone diseases, these particles can encourage the bones to regrow. There are also nanoparticles that do the same with soft tissue.
So, what will nanotechnology be able to do in the future? Well, they will be able to do all of the things they do right now, but far more accurately and effectively. There will be nanoparticles, such as graphene, which will be able to replace missing parts of the body. Research into graphene use on spinal damage is happening today. They will be able to carry more accurate detectors and monitors around the body, finding illness and locating cancers. They may also be able to cure or remove the cancers as and when they find them. We might be able to have a constant stream of nanoparticles floating around in our blood that are an addition to our immune system. The immune system cannot detect cancer because it is made of our own cells. We could have nanoparticles that are there to instruct the immune system to attack the cancer. There is also the possibility of body enhancement. Nanotechnology could be used to push our bodies further. It could reduce lactic acid or other chemicals that hinder us. There is no limit to what it might be able to do. However, there are risks and these are not understood yet. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2414644723000337
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10536529
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotechnology
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4471123
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanometre
https://www.nano.gov/about-nanotechnology/applications-nanotechnology
https://jnanobiotechnology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12951-018-0392-8
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1949907
https://www.cancer.gov/nano/cancer-nanotechnology/detection-diagnosis
Photo by Google DeepMind: https://www.pexels.com/photo/abstract-shapes-of-molecule-25626518/