Home > News > Tiny particles expand frontier of medicine
February 27th, 2010
Tiny particles expand frontier of medicine
Abstract:
They're built by the billions and are 1,000 times smaller than the width of a hair.
They can change their colour, glow in lustrous hues, travel like magic to desired areas of the body and one day, soon, will almost certainly be finding and curing cancer.
Sound like medical pixie dust?
Welcome to the wondrous world of nanoparticles, which are on the verge of changing the way we treat and diagnose a host of ailments around the world.
"The field is growing exponentially, investment in the field is growing exponentially," says University of Toronto medical engineer Warren Chan. "And in the next 10 to 15 years you're going to see an exponential growth in terms of products," says Chan, 35, a pioneer in the incipient field of nanomedicine.
"Stars, spheres, rods, triangles, almost any kind of structure we can see with our eyes, you can make 1,000 or a million times smaller," says Chan, who is an acknowledged pioneer in the field. "But it's not just that you can make these pretty structures that small, it's that the properties of the material ... can be changed by changing the size or shape of the material,"
Properties such as colour, electrical conductivity and magnetism, can be altered by shifting their shape or dimensions.
By coating nanoparticles with substances that recognize and bind to molecules that are exclusive to the surface of cancer cells, you can essentially make a tumour into a trap.
Source:
healthzone.ca
Bookmark:
| Related News Press |
News and information
Simulating magnetization in a Heisenberg quantum spin chain April 5th, 2024
NRL charters Navy’s quantum inertial navigation path to reduce drift April 5th, 2024
Discovery points path to flash-like memory for storing qubits: Rice find could hasten development of nonvolatile quantum memory April 5th, 2024
Possible Futures
Discovery points path to flash-like memory for storing qubits: Rice find could hasten development of nonvolatile quantum memory April 5th, 2024
With VECSELs towards the quantum internet Fraunhofer: IAF achieves record output power with VECSEL for quantum frequency converters April 5th, 2024
Academic/Education
Rice University launches Rice Synthetic Biology Institute to improve lives January 12th, 2024
Multi-institution, $4.6 million NSF grant to fund nanotechnology training September 9th, 2022
Nanomedicine
New micromaterial releases nanoparticles that selectively destroy cancer cells April 5th, 2024
Good as gold - improving infectious disease testing with gold nanoparticles April 5th, 2024
Researchers develop artificial building blocks of life March 8th, 2024
Sensors
Announcements
NRL charters Navy’s quantum inertial navigation path to reduce drift April 5th, 2024
Discovery points path to flash-like memory for storing qubits: Rice find could hasten development of nonvolatile quantum memory April 5th, 2024
Nanobiotechnology
New micromaterial releases nanoparticles that selectively destroy cancer cells April 5th, 2024
Good as gold - improving infectious disease testing with gold nanoparticles April 5th, 2024
Researchers develop artificial building blocks of life March 8th, 2024
 |
||
 |
||
| The latest news from around the world, FREE | ||
 |
||
|
|
||
| Premium Products | ||
 |
||
|
Only the news you want to read!
Learn More |
||
 |
||
|
Full-service, expert consulting
Learn More |
||
|
|
||