Some forecasts have predicted the nanotechnology market to reach close to a trillion dollars by 2015, presenting investors with unique opportunities. However, the market for applications of nanotechnology is complex, multidisciplinary and highly segmented. It is therefore essential to gain an understanding of which market sectors nanotechnology is likely to impact most profoundly in the near term.
That’s what we do at Cientifica.
Since we now know most (if not all) biological processes occur at the nanoscale, the application of life science principles – studying the causes of biological phenomena at the molecular level – means medical and biomedical research is increasingly using a bottom-up rather than the traditional top-down approach, and it is also the area which all our data points to as giving the highest returns from the application of nanotechnologies.
So today we release the first fruits of a major research program we have been undertaking, trying to understand the relationship between nanotechnology and medicine, and to generate some useful market predictions of the kind that are both rational and accurate.
Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery 2011 provides an in-depth presentation of recent developments in nanotech drug delivery (NDD) and provides market opportunities to 2021, for the largest economies in the Americas, Asia, Europe and the rest of the world.
To get to our market forecasts for NDD from 2011 to 2021 we also had to determine the historical market growth for NDD between 2000-2010, which meant wading through a mire of disinformation and speculation (as well as sifting through thousands of publications).
Unusually for this kind of report, we can now segment the market by geographical region and by technology type.
We examined every kind of technology types examined including: solubility & bioavailability, targeted delivery, drug nanocrystals, liposomes, carbon nanotubes, gold nanocarriers, dendrimers, micelles, polymer-based nanocarriers, nanoshells, ceramic nanocarriers, calcium phosphate nanocarriers and many more.
So where is the opportunity? We recommend looking at liposomes, drug nanocrystals and gold nanoparticles, and reading Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery 2011 will tell you why.
The researchers Fredrik Nederberg, Kazuki Fukushima and James L. Hedrick from IBM Research at IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, USA and the researchers Ying Zhang, Jeremy P. K. Tan, Chuan Yang, Shujun Gao and Yi-Yan Yang from the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, in Singapore made an important discovery in nanomedicine. Their discovery, published online in Nature on 3 April 2011, demonstrated that:
- New types of polymers can physically detect and destroy antibiotic-resistant bacteria and infectious diseases like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (known as MRSA) Biodegradable nanostructures are physically attracted to infected cells like a magnet attracts iron filings, allowing them to selectively eradicate hard to treat bacteria without destroying healthy cells on the surroundings;
- These nanostructures also prevent the bacteria from developing drug resistance by actually breaking through the bacterial cell wall and membrane, thereby inducing the lyses of these cells. This mode of attack approach is fundamentally different from the traditional antibiotics approach.
MRSA is just one type of dangerous bacteria that is commonly found on the skin and easily contracted in places like gymnasiums, schools and hospitals.
In 2005, MRSA was responsible for about 95,000 serious infections and was associated with almost 19,000 hospital stay-related deaths in the USA. This is why MRSA is designated as a hospital bacterium.
The challenge to combat bacterial infections such as MRSA has two aspects:
- Drug resistance occurs because microorganisms are able to evolve to a new form effectively resistant to antibiotics (previously administered antibiotics prior to the evolution). This happens because current treatments leave their cell wall and membrane typically undamaged;
- The high doses of antibiotics required to kill such an infection destroy both contaminated cells as well as healthy red blood cells, through a indiscriminately way.
Once these polymers come into contact with water in our body, they self assemble into a new polymer structure that is designed to target bacteria membranes based on electrostatic interaction and break through their cell membranes and walls (inducing lyses). Upon the physical pesrpective, this action prevents bacteria from developing resistance to these nanoparticles. The electric charge naturally found in cells is crucial because the new polymer structures are attracted only to the infected areas, combating bacteria, while preserving the healthy red blood cells.
This discovery is highly relevant because it strongly enhances the potential application:
- IBM Research created an entirely new mechanism of nanotechnology in drug delivery specifically designed to target an infected area to allow for a systemic delivery of the drug, which can become more specific and effective;
- The use of those new biodegradable nanostructures highly and effectively contributes to viable therapy of MRSA and other infectious diseases. Unlike most antimicrobial materials, these are biodegradable: they are naturally eliminated from the body (rather than remaining into the body accumulating in organs).
Ironically, the discovered was achieved by applying principles used in semiconductor manufacturing.
IBM has a long and continuing commitment to nanoscience and nanotechnology. Just a few examples, among many:
- On 1981, the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM) was invented by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer (at IBM Zürich) – Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986.
- On September 28, 1989, the IBM researcher Don Eigler (at the IBM Almaden Research Center), using a STM and 35 individual atoms of Xenon, printed the IBM logo;
- On 3 April 2011, the breakthrough described above launches IBM at full speed in the fields of nanotechnology in drug delivery.
It is my strong conviction that, in what concerns to IBM research in the adoption of nanotechnology to medicine and biomedicine, the very best is yet to come.
The Evolution Of Control
Here’s a slide that anyone who has seen one of my presentations recently will be familiar with – illustrating the shift we are undergoing from using things that we find to producing the things that we need, something beautifully illustrated by the recent slough of news items about the ‘invention” of artificial arteries using nanotechnology.
Professor George Hamilton from the Royal Free Hospital in North-West London said, “The new graft pulses rhythmically to match the beat of the heart. The graft material is strong, flexible, resistant to blood clotting and doesn’t break down, which is a major breakthrough.”
The real breakthrough of course, is that we have been able to create something that works as well as the material that nature has been using for arteries!
Ten years ago nanotechnology was thought to be a technology that would enable us to cure all kinds of disease by creating tiny robots, or replacing natures creations with our own. In fact a great deal of time and effort went into producing large tomes fantasising about how we could replace our nervous and circulatory systems with various things that may be one day created if the laws of physics and chemistry could somehow be bent in a way that would allow them (as well as warp speed travel, teleportation, holodecks etc – you get the idea).
Fortunately the rest of the scientific community was focused on more practical issues, and the most exciting thing about nanotechnology is it’s ability to give us the precise control over the properties of materials that we have lacked for so long. For the past twenty thousand years we have been using things that we found int he environment, a rock and a stick for example as tools. We got a little more sophisticated when we realised that certain types of rock contained ores of metals, and developed bronze, iron and finally steel tools, but we were still adapting things that we happened to find.
Adding functionality to a bit of PTFE through control over the properties of materials
Synthetic chemistry and polymers moved us a few steps away from depending directly on things we stumbled upon in the natural world, but they have always been crude when compared to the creations of nature – bone is a favourite example of nature coming up with the prefect solution, something that is rigid without being brittle, and self repairing to a large extent.
But where we are heading now is that our combined knowledge of biology, chemistry, and physics is being applied at the nanoscale to create materials and devices that essentially mimic what nature has already created, but with the added element of control.As The Med Guru reports, the artificial artery is far from being just a bit of tubing, and our control over the nanoscale properties of the material, and our ability to reproduce this over larger areas, has enabled to device to have a number of different functions and it these in combination that makes this kind of breakthrough so important.
Study of controlling matter on an atomic and molecular scale coupled with use of nanotechnology enables the spikes to magnetize stem cells or ‘master cells’ from the blood.
“Once the stem cells are attracted to it, they cover the whole inside of it and turn into endothelial cells,” informs Professor Alexander Seifalian
That is the real technology revolution, the ability to specify the properties of an ideal material, and then create it.
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