Complete course notes

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1 Nanomedicine: principles and applications 26.2.2017 – injectable nanotechnology The idea consists in the injection of nanoparticles in order to prevent or cure diseases. It’s difficult to provide a definition of nanomedicine because it rapidly changes; it’s something related to the production of nanomaterials for medical use and it’s a very multidisciplinary field (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering). So basically, nanomedicine derives from nanotechnology which is the creation and use of materials at the level of molecules and atoms (sometimes specifically less than 100 nm). So, what does “nano” mean? As said, sometimes we refer to something whose dimensions are lower than 100 nm. In general, we can say that “macro” refers to the cells, “micro” to the dimension of bacteria and “nano” to the scale of viruses, proteins and aggregates of these compounds. Nanotechnologies has to do with something smaller than 1 µm. There are different fields of application of nanotechnologies:  Chemistry and environment  Energy  Heavy industry  Consumer goods  Information technology  Medicine, as regards this last field we have the following applications:  Diagnostics  use of nano-tracers, that may be radioactive or fluorescent, in the localization of tumours.  Drug delivery  tumours are generally treated with chemotherapy that is not so selective and has strong side effects; instead of this treatment we can use nanocarriers to incapsulate these toxic drugs and to release them only where the tumour is.  Gene delivery  a cancerous cell does not produce some proteins and overexpresses others, we want to introduce pieces of DNA and RNA in the cells to cure them. There is a problem of instability that requires for an encapsulation.  Vaccines  vaccines permit our immune…