Nanotechnology in Medicine
Nanotechnology in Medicine When thinking of Nanotechnology one could think of the movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. In the movie Cobra steals nanotech warheads and attacks the Eiffel Tower and it is destroyed by molecule sized machines in a matter of minutes. At this point in time nanotechnology is nowhere near this far along. Nanotechnology of today is about manipulating different types of matter on a molecular scale thus making them stronger and more durable (Williamson, Kenneth D. New Products). Hopefully we’ll be able to create the nanobots of G.I. Joe in the near future but for now it is just science fiction. With the science of nanotechnology we can revolutionize the field of medicine like never before, destroy cancer in the human body without killing the host body and revolutionize diagnostic imaging technology. Nanotechnology in medicine is often referred to as Nano medicine. One of the first uses of nanotech in medicine was in the early nineties. Silver Nano crystals were developed and used as an ant-microbial agent in healing infections (Nanotech in Med. silver coatings). Another use is in burn treatment. The burn dressing applied to burns is loaded with nanoparticle sized antibiotics that are released when encountering a foreign organism (Nanotech in Med.) Another positive use for preventative care is the use of “Buckyballs”. Buckyballs are an accidental discovery made by Richard Smalley in the early 1980s; they are a form of carbon which has been found to be able to purify any kind of water thus preventing people from catching water borne sicknesses (Nanotech’s Impact). Currently the fight against cancer uses the bloodstream as the delivery system for toxic drugs. A cancer patient in the process of taking these drugs is subjected to a mind numbing array of horrible side effects. In 2012 a company, Bind Biosciences submitted clinical data on their use of nanotechnology to fight cancerous tumors. Their data shows that more of the cancer drug is
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