By: Jean Johnson for MedTech1Ponce de Leon, the Spanish explorer of the early 16th century, would most likely pay more than passing notice. The fountain of youth for which he searched so valiantly in the Caribbean and Florida never loomed so close. At least some might argue that’s the case.
Imagine being able to re-grow bone and skin tissue. Or target drugs to specific sites in the body and remove obstructions in the circulatory system. Or identify and kill cancer cells. For that matter, imagine science and technology so sophisticated that, as Mool C. Gupta, PhD and Langley Distinguished Professor at the National Institute of Aerospace said, we could “detect diseases in an early stage and then destroy the diseases.”
That’s what nanotechnology – the umbrella term for the study of really, really tiny particles that are one one-hundredth the size of a human hair – seems to be promising.
Science Fiction? Magic?
If working at the scale of nanometers that are a billionth of a meter or a millionth of a millimeter sounds too much like science fiction to be true, consider what our grandmothers would think about things like interventional radiology where doctors can make internal repairs via nicks in the skin through which they run a spaghetti-size catheter to the targeted site, all the while using a monitor to track their progress. Then there are the planes, televisions and computers that our ancestors no more than a century removed would find so very strange and outside the realm of what they considered humanly possible.
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Nanoparticles – very small particles of titanium dioxide – work to protect against sunburn and skin aging by forming a protective shield over the skin. Tiny nanoparticles 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a hair reflect sunbeams.
Some researchers say sunscreens with these tiny nanoparticles are better for people with sensitive skin than were the UV filters that were initially the mainstay in sunscreens.
On the makeup front, nanoparticles are big medicine. According to a Guardian article the Organic Consumers Association maintains on its Web site, “L'Oréal, one of the biggest research players, is investigating the delivery of vitamin E into the skin through nanoparticles, while Estée Lauder's Clinique brand already has a serum that contains them.”
“L'Oréal has a huge research complex in Paris underpinning its many brands, including Vichy, Helena Rubinstein, Cacharel and Maybelline. It files almost a patent a day, more than any other company in the field, and is also pursuing nanoparticles or, as they call them, nanosomes, to penetrate between the layers of skin delivering vitamin E.” |
In other words, nanotechnology is very brave new world stuff. But things like this never bothered the renowned British science fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” wrote Clarke. The quote is courtesy of J. Storr Hall, PhD and researcher, who spoke at the August 2006 conference titled: “The Next Industrial Revolution: Nanotechnology and Manufacturing.” Held at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee where Andrew Eder of KnoxNews was in attendance, scientists updated those gathered on the status of nanotechnology and its future potential.
From Eder’s perspective, “the things Hall described sure sounded like magic: A ‘utility fog’ consisting of tiny robots the size of human cells that can morph from solid to liquid to gas and generate just about anything – furniture, clothing, roads – on demand.”
How it Works – Nanotechnology as Applied to Medicine
Nanotechnology or “the manufacturing technology of the 21st century,” according to Robert Freitas, author of a book series on nanomedicine, will give the healthcare industry radical new molecular tools to cure what ails us. With this capability, says Freitas, clinicians will be able to intervene at the cellular and molecular levels.
“Disease and ill health are caused largely by damage at the molecular and cellular level. Today’s surgical tools are, at this scale, large and crude,” wrote Freitas. “Nanotechnology will let us build fleets of computer controlled molecular tools much smaller than a human cell and built with the accuracy and precision of drug molecules.
“Such tools will let medicine, for the first time, intervene in a sophisticated and controlled way at the cellular and molecular level. Just as today we have the artificial heart, so in the future we could have the artificial mitochondrion.”
The mitochondria, as we learned in biology courses way back when, are the powerhouses of the cells where oxygen is metabolized for healthy tissue. If blood flow is interrupted for any number of reasons, the tissue will be injured and at some point the mitochondria will fail. Consequently the energy, or ATP (adenosine triphosphate), that is required for life processes will not be available. Researchers are theorizing, however, that with nanotechnology they will be able to bypass the mitochondrion process and simply deliver ATP directly to the cells to restore function.
Nanotechnology has similar implications for regenerative medicine. In the 1960s and 1970s the first generation of materials led to implants that the body would not reject. By the 1980s the field had developed substances useful in the fields of orthopedics and dentistry. More recently science through nanomedicine is experimenting with biomaterials that when implanted will prompt the body to heal itself by intervening at the level of the cell, and molecule where atom by atom, nature constructs the stuff of the universe.
Timeline and Research Dollars
We’ve got a ways to go, and science cannot offer a precise time table. But if things proceed as they have been and enough investment is marshaled by believers in nanotechnology, some in the know say we could have a form of molecular manufacturing within the 2010 to 2020 decade. Actual medical applications, of course, will take additional time after that to develop.
According to the Eder account, Patti Glaza, CEO of Small Times Media said that “about $300 million worth of deals were done in the nanotechnology industry in the second quarter of 2006.” More, research in nanoscience and technology has seen a sharp rise in the last decade around the world with billions of dollars of investments from governments and private sectors. At the state level in Oregon, for example, brainchild and venture capitalist David Chen saw nanotechnology coming in 2002. As chairman of the board of the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnology Institute (ONAMI), Chen has successfully worked to attract federal dollars to the state for this cutting-edge research reported Oregon Business Magazine.
One Step Forward – And One Step Back?
Nanotechnology may be all the rage, attracting the brightest minds both on the science and the business side. But the Eder report on the Oak Ridge conference contained a cautionary note from Charlene Bayer, PhD and principal research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute. Referring to the nanoparticles that are already making their way into sunscreens, deodorant and makeup, Bayer said, “You’re putting them on your body because you want a more effective product, but do you know what they do to your body?”
The researcher went on to compare people’s current lust for nanotechnology to that which society had for DDT prior to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” that proved the pesticide wiped out bird populations by the millions. Wrote Eder, “Bayer said legal protections for nanotechnology workers are outdated, and researchers need to consider whether the benefits of their work outweigh the costs.”
For his part, Charles Vyvyan Howard, PhD and head of research with the developmental toxico-pathology research group at Liverpool University, told the Guardian that the tiny particles have a toxicity that seems to be directly related to their size, which can cause inflammation. He also points out that studies have shown that fine particles of the size now being used in sunscreen have gone through the skin and ended up in the lymphatic system.
"If you apply them to the skin or ingest them, where do they go to?" Howard asked. "Do they go to the brain or the fetus? There is no regulation. As is usual with brand-new technologies, it is way ahead of the regulators. For the future, I would like to see more reassurance that these particles truly do not penetrate further than the outer skin layers. If they do, they become part of our body.”
Bayer and Howard might have a point. Still a second August 2006 conference half way across the globe in India drew scientists from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Mexico and India. Similarly, this new frontier of knowledge has countries throughout Europe jockeying for a competitive advantage in nanotechnology, where many have a keen eye on the implications of medical applications for the world’s sizable aging population.
Toward this end the European Commission produced a vision paper, “European Technology Platform on NanoMedicine,” in which it referred to improving “the quality of life and health care of its citizens” and pointedly closed its remarks with the statement: "As might be appreciated, developing these systems within our lifetimes would be advantageous for a variety of reasons.”
Indeed, ever since human beings have realized the tremendous power inherent in science and technology, they have looked to it as a panacea for saving society from a host of problems. Given nanotechnology’s potential to create machines so tiny that thousands would fit on the tip of a pin and function at the molecular level, the implications are tremendous, radical, and of truly revolutionary proportions.
It is a brave new world and conjures up both hope and fear. How nice that the word nanotechnology which will apparently be controlling our destinies has such an appealing sound. After all, everyone can warm up to a word that sounds like Nana.
