Completed notes of the course

Page 1

1. Basic Principles To figure out what nanomedicine means there is simply to remind the words from which such term comes from: a combination of “nanotechnology” and “medicine”. So , the feeling is that any sort of nanotechnology applied for medicine. For example, let’s think about drug delivery, or hydrogels for tissue engineering: whatever involves the use of nanotechnology for curing diseases is roughly what nanomedicine is about. However, we find out soon that an exact definition of nanomedicine does not exist. All of them are similar, but not the same. For example: “The science and technology 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”. “An offshoot of nanotechnology, which refers to highly specific medical interventions at the molecular scale for curing disease or repairing damaged tissues, such as bone, muscle, or nerve”. The main problem is to define what nanotechnology means or , more simply, what a nanoscale is. Let’s deal at first with inorganic nanoparticles such as gold nanoparticles: this material gains some specific physical properties only when the size of th ose particles is extremely small – only few nanometres, like 5 nanometres, maybe 10. If we overcome the 100-nanometre threshold, it's going to be just gold. On the other hand, in medical field, anything that is smaller than one micron is “nano”. For example, if we consider microbes, their dimension relies on a range of 1 micron: if we go below, it is possible to find anything that potentially could be called nano, so this definition may vary depending on which field we are considering. Nanomedicine i s a highly multidisciplinary field. So, we…