Nanopharmaceuticals are revolutionizing the medical field – this technology can replace surgery and chemotherapy in cancer treatment. Nanomedicine is said to have a lot of potential to become a “weapon” in the treatment of many diseases.

Nanopharmaceuticals and practical applications

“There is no doubt that we need to improve our treatments for diseases like cancer, tuberculosis and many others,” said Vicki Stone, principal of the Heriot-Watt Institute for Nano-Safety Research. know. “Nanopharmaceuticals offer many opportunities to improve the diagnosis and targeted treatment of many diseases.”

In 2011 IBM created the smallest 3D map ever, this is a 25 nm copy of the Matterhorn.

Nanotechnology has been applied in many aspects of life – from food to cosmetics, medicine to treat diseases. There are many types of nanomedicine that are currently approved to treat diseases such as cancer, high cholesterol, yeast infections, hepatitis and many more. Nanomolecules and nanomedicines, even nanorobots can be used not only in targeted drug delivery, but also in the production of vaccines, imaging, and infection identification. or is also applied in the technology of creating new tissue.

Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley said: “Human health has always been defined at the nanoscale”, which is the smallest size in a cell in all living things, which shows the application. of nanoscience on treatment and health care is enormous”.

Reduce side effects

There is much research on nanopharmaceuticals focused on cancer treatment, nearly two decades ago chemotherapy drugs like Doxil were used in the treatment of Kaposi’s sarcoma – this is a type of disease. A rare cancer commonly seen in people with AIDS and is currently used to treat certain types of cancer. Doxil is applied nanotechnology that knows how to deliver the drug doxorubicin to cancer cells, encased in multi-pigmented vesicles about 100 nm in size. This nano-formula not only helps deliver drugs to the tumor more accurately, but also helps reduce unpleasant side effects such as bone marrow failure and heart muscle damage.

The usual methods of cancer diagnosis are biopsies and surgery, which often affect nearby organs and are ineffective in the early stages of the disease, while chemotherapy engulfs the body in the early stages of the disease. toxic chemicals that do not target the tumor directly. Nanotechnology is a much more effective and safe diagnostic method than the ones mentioned above, targeting cancer cells directly and causing few side effects. Because of their compact size, nanoparticles can easily slip through gaps in blood vessels and tumors. The special properties of nanoparticles are permeability and retention (EPR).

Not only are they compact, the nanoparticles can also self-align themselves to form a complex structure. This means that nanopharmaceuticals are designed to target a certain part of the body. They can be magnetized with light so that they can be easily activated by control from outside the body. They can even deliver drugs and show characteristic features in diagnostic images, so a single injection is needed for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

The most important purpose of drug treatment is to match the transformation of the human body. “Physicians still rely heavily on the body’s ability to heal itself,” said Robert A. Freitas, MD, a senior researcher at the Institute for Molecular Production, California. “But in the future we will develop therapeutic tools at the molecular level that control 3D for greater precision. With this tool we can evaluate the exact position of the components in the human body cells and rearrange them in the original order.

Types of molecular machines

It is difficult to distinguish nano-medicinal drugs from conventional drugs due to their similar manifestations. Some researchers, including Freitas, believe that because these nanomedicines produce nanoparticles smaller than the size of an atom, it is possible in the future to create nanorobots for medicine. about the size of a virus or bacteria.