THE ELEMENT
The Future of Nanotechnology Nanotechnology is the manipulation of materials on an atomic or molecular scale and can involve the usage of nanoparticles, which are microscopic particles with at least one dimension less than 100 nanometers. Examples of prevalent nanomaterials include carbon based nanoparticles such as the buckminsterfullerene, graphene sheets and nanotubes, liposomes and metal based nanoparticles such as silver or gold. Nanotechnology, despite not being used yet on a larger scale, has huge potential implications in fields such as drug delivery, improving air quality and increasing the energy efficiency of products.
Much of the research going into nanotechnology is focused on drug delivery systems whose efficacy is thereby drastically improved by modification or usage of nanoparticles. These tiny particles have the capacity to mitigate huge problems such as targeting cancer cells with excellent precision, permitted by their extremely high surface area to volume ratio compared to the same mass of 37
material in a larger form. This allows drug delivery to have reduced toxicity, improved efficacy and enhanced distribution. Nanoparticle drug delivery systems, on account of their minute size, can easily penetrate across barriers in small capillaries into single cells, for example the blood brain barrier, which allows the specific drug to accumulate at the targeted locations in the body more successfully. Therefore this reduces the toxicity of the therapeutic agent as well as decreasing the drugs side effects and increasing treatment efficacy. The impact of the drugs side effects are reduced by nanoparticles not releasing the medicine till they reach the target cell or tissue, which prevents the drugs from damaging healthy tissues around the tumour, which are the cause of side effects. Furthermore, the therapeutic agents can be packed into nanoparticles that are unidentifiable by the human immune system essentially giving them “stealth mode” properties which allow antiviral drugs to target for example, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infected cells. For example, cancer chemotherapy cytostatic drugs damage both malignant and normal cells alike. However nano drug delivery, such as nanoshells coated with gold, selectively target malignant breast cancer cells only. This is done by combining infrared optical activity with properties of gold colloid, which allows the particle, of size smaller than 75 nanometers in diameter, to absorb and scatter the incidence of light.
