What is Nanomedicine?

Nanomedicine is the application of nanotechnology to the field of medicine in order to develop new methods of detecting and treating diseases in humans (Johns Hopkins Medicine 2018). Nanomedicine involves a large range of applications and technologies but it can be divided into two main areas: Nanotherapy and Nanodiagnostics.

Nanotherapy

Nanotherapy (sometimes also known as target therapy) involves a process called targeting which uses nanoparticles to deliver a drug directly to a target location in the body.

Treatments such as traditional chemotherapy are unable to target the cancer cells directly as it is delivered through the circulatory system. This means the drug gets pumped all around the body, affecting both healthy and the cancerous cells. As this method of chemotherapy is extremely toxic to healthy cells, patients often experience many undesirable symptoms and side effects.

As nanotherapy is able to deliver the drug directly to the unhealthy cells, this method can help treat the disease without affecting the healthy cells therefore, drastically reducing the negative side effects.

Nanodiagnostics

Nanodiagnistics is a method of using nanotechnology to identify diseases at the earliest stage possible by using extremely sensitive sensors or imaging technology. Due to the unique properties of nanoparticles, nanodiagnostics tools are more sensitive and specific enough to help identify diseases at a the level of a single unhealthy cell as early as possible. Nanoparticles are so useful because scientists can pack all the technology needed to identify the presence of diseases as well as collect the necessary data to inform doctors about the stage and condition of the disease. Nanoelectronics can also be incorporated in to other tools (which are not nanodiagnostic specific tools) to improve operation sensitivity.

There are two types of nanodiagnostics:

• Invitro: means “in glass”. This means that the testing for the disease or medical condition is being done outside the human or organism, usually in a test tube or a glass dish in a lab.

• Invivo: means “in the living”. This means that the testing for the disease or medical condition is being done inside the human or organism while they are alive.

Invitro nanodiagnostics:

For ethical reasons, when testing a new drug on a diseases or medical conditions (eg. Cancer), researchers usually start with an In vitro study (in a test tube or a glass dish in a lab). For example, they might grow some cancer cells in a glass dish in the lab and then apply the new drug to these cells. They can then study the results and learn as much as possible about how the drug works and any side effects and decide whether it is safe to administer to humans. This is also a great method of studying the effects of a drug because researchers can conduct experiments many times by using a large number of samples to get more accurate results.

Invivo nanodiagnostics:

Once the new drug has been tested through invitro studies and it has been deemed safe to administer to living organisms, researchers conduct in vivo studies (inside living things). This is important to see how a living organism and all of the body’s systems as a whole will respond to the new drug.

Sometimes drugs initially appear to work well during invitro studies in a lab dish. However when applied to a invivo study in a working body system, they operate unexpectedly or differently which can be detrimental to the organism. In this case, more tests and modifications to the drug are required in order to be deemed safe for medicinal use in live organisms.

Invivo studies are never first done on humans, they are usually first done in living organisms such as mice. Even though mice have a working body system, they have a very different body system to humans so even drugs that appear to be safe and work well in mice, can be found to be unsafe in humans.