With increasing advances in nanotechnology, scientists are proving that bigger isn’t always better. The health care field is exploring this microscopic movement to better care for patients.
In recent years, scientists discovered that nanotechnology can bring significant advances to the diagnosis and treatment of many ailments. Nanotechnology combines physics, biology and chemistry to mimic certain processes found in nature, also called a bottom-up approach.
Through this approach, scientists can build highly organized molecules that contain specific properties, like complex machines small enough to be inserted into a patient’s body to perform lengthy surgical procedures.
Paul Weiss, professor and presidential chair in the chemistry and biochemistry departments at the University of California-Los Angeles, is an expert in the field of nanotechnology.
“What we are best known for is looking for the ultimate limits of miniaturization, the smallest switches and motors in the world,” he said in an article by the University of Miami. “Once upon a time I was the first one to move atoms around on a surface with a scanning microscope. We were looking for what’s beneath the atoms and trying to figure out why they were where they were. It really opened up this world where we could make structures and then test them.”
Using nanotechnology, scientists and medical professionals are aiming to pair an individual diagnosis with a personalized treatment using minimally invasive surgery or medication that can meet a patient’s specific needs. It is also speculated to considerably impact the costs and insurance models within the health care system.
Scientists are hoping that sustainable and clean production processes with nanotechnology can be developed without producing much waste.
So, what exactly can nanotechnology do?
In 1959, late Nobel Prize in Physics recipient Richard P. Feynman proposed a nanorobotic surgical procedure to cure heart disease, after which many scientists have speculated the scope of implementing nanotechnologies in similar procedures.
Nanomedicine researchers are currently looking at ways that nanotechnology can improve vaccines, including how to administer them without using needles.
Scientists are experimenting with putting nanosponges into a patient’s bloodstream to soak up toxic drug molecules in the blood.
In the field of dentistry, microscopic nanobots might be able to use specific motility mechanisms to crawl or swim through human tissue, which will give these nanorobots the ability to move independently through the human body simply using metabolic energy.
Nanotechnologies also have the potential to offer invaluable advances, like the use of nanocoatings to slow the release of asthma medication in the lungs. This will allow people with asthma to experience longer periods of relief from symptoms after using inhalants.
In a similar vein, researchers are looking at ways nanotechnology can help combat COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses.
“Nanoparticles can easily be aerosolized, so what better target opportunity than something you could put in an inhaler and breathe in, to attach to those COVID-19 cells in your lungs,” says Zafiropoulo chair of chemical engineering at Northeastern University Thomas Webster in the same University of Miami article. “Viruses are nanostructured, so what better to stop it than a nanomaterial?”
Despite the benefits, nanotechnologies do come with drawbacks. While it has tremendous potential, there are issues of ethics, regulations and human safety which must be addressed before nanotechnology can be seen as the future of health care.
Nanotechnology is already broadening the scope of certain medical tools, knowledge and therapies which are currently available to clinicians. The application of nanotechnology in medicine will be able to give us precise solutions for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of various diseases.
So instead of asking our doctors to think big, maybe we should be asking them to think smaller.
Sanaya Attari is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
