Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine

1. Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine

“There is a growing sense in the scientific and technical community that we are about to enter a golden new era,” announced Richard E. Smalley, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in recent Congressional testimony [1]. On June 22, 1999, Smalley spoke in support of a new National Nanotechnology Initiative before the Subcommittee on Basic Research of the U.S. House Science Committee in Washington, DC. “We are about to be able to build things that work on the smallest possible length scales, atom by atom,” Smalley said. “Over the past century we have learned about the workings of biological nanomachines to an incredible level of detail, and the benefits of this knowledge are beginning to be felt in medicine. In coming decades we will learn to modify and adapt this machinery to extend the quality and length of life.” Smalley founded the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in Texas in 1996. But he became personally interested in the medical applications of nanotechnology in 1999, after he was diagnosed with a type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (the same sort that killed King Hussein of Jordan). Smalley then endured an apparently successful course of chemotherapy that caused all the hair on his head to fall out.

“Twenty years ago,” Smalley continued, “without even this crude chemotherapy I would already be dead. But twenty years from now, I am confident we will no longer have to use this blunt tool. By then, nanotechnology will have given us specially engineered drugs which are nanoscale cancer-seeking missiles, a molecular technology that specifically targets just the mutant cancer cells in the human body, and leaves everything else blissfully alone. To do this, these drug molecules will have to be big enough – thousands of atoms – so that we can code the information into them of where they should go and what they should kill. They will be examples of an exquisite, human-made nanotechnology of the future. I may not live to see it. But, with your help, I am confident it will happen. Cancer – at least the type that I have – will be a thing of the past.”

The term “nanotechnology” generally refers to engineering and manufacturing at the molecular or nanometer length scale. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, about the width of 6 bonded carbon atoms.) The field is experiencing an explosion of interest. Nanotechnology is so promising that the U.S. President, in his January 2000 State-of-the-Union speech, announced that he would seek $475 million for nanotechnology R&D via the National Nanotechnology Initiative, effectively doubling federal nanotech funding for FY2001. The President never referred to “nanotechnology” by name, but he gushed about its capabilities, marveling at a technology that will someday produce “molecular computers the size of a tear drop with the power of today’s fastest supercomputers.”

After the President’s speech, Walter Finkelstein, president and CEO of NanoFab Inc. in Columbia, MD, agreed that it was conceivable that the technology could be used to develop computers chips so small that they could be injected into the bloodstream – “Fantastic Voyage-like,” he said – to locate medical problems. In February 2000, John Hopcroft, dean of the College of Engineering at Cornell University, announced plans for a new 150,000-square-foot nanotechnology research center. The facility already has $12 million per year of earmarked funding and is expected to support 90 local jobs and approximately 110 graduate students. “The implications of this research are enormous,” Hopcroft asserted, and include “the development of mechanical devices that can fight disease within the human body.

In May 2000, the National Cancer Institute signed an agreement with NASA, the U.S. space agency, to study the medical potential of nanoparticles. Nanoscience has also attracted the attention of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which hosted one of the first nanotechnology and biomedicine conferences in June 2000. In July, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative to provide an estimated $74 million in funding for nanotechnology research. Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois will spend $30 million on a new nanofabrication facility of its own, joining existing operations such as the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility (started in 1985 with $15 million of backing from 20 industrial sponsors) and the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility, expected to attract 450 researchers in 2000, half of them visiting scientists. Cornell is spending $50 million on a new building for the Facility, and has just won a $20 million, five-year grant from the NSF to operate a new nanobiotechnology center which will make nanoscale tools available to biologists.

Burgeoning interest in the medical applications of nanotechnology has led to the emergence of a new field called nanomedicine [2, 3]. Most broadly, nanomedicine is the process of diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease and traumatic injury, of relieving pain, and of preserving and improving human health, using molecular tools and molecular knowledge of the human body.

It is most useful to regard the emerging field of nanomedicine as a set of three mutually overlapping and progressively more powerful technologies. First, in the relatively near term, nanomedicine can address many important medical problems by using nanoscale-structured materials that can be manufactured today. This includes the interaction of nanostructured materials with biological systems – in June 2000, the first 12 Ph.D. candidates in “nanobiotechnology” began laboratory work at Cornell University. Second, over the next 5-10 years, biotechnology will make possible even more remarkable advances in molecular medicine and biobotics (microbiological robots), some of which are already on the drawing boards. Third, in the longer term, perhaps 10-20 years from today, the earliest molecular machine systems and nanorobots may join the medical armamentarium, finally giving physicians the most potent tools imaginable to conquer