Читать книгу Green Nanomaterials - Siddharth Patwardhan - Страница 23

Healthcare utilises a range of nanomaterials, such as silver in wound-dressing (covered in later sections on consumer products), however, since the 1980s, and with a rapid increased effort in the last 20 years, a new field of biomedical research and application has developed called nanomedicine. Nanomedicine is the utilisation of nanotechnology in medicine. This is a really powerful concept, due once again to length scale. As can be seen from figure 2.1, medically relevant biological entities such as proteins and DNA are comparably sized to nanoparticles, making their interaction specific and optimal. Nanomedicine has utilised very specific nanoparticles for imaging disease or specific markers in areas of the body (diagnostics/imaging), or for treatment (therapeutics) or in some cases both (theragnostics) for a range of target diseases. This includes using nanoparticles to highlight specific areas of disease, for either imaging or removal (by magnetic separation), using them as vehicles to deliver drugs to specific disease sites, or using their nanoscale properties such as photothermia and magnetic hyperthermia to treat diseases, with an emphasis on cancer [8]. In vitro diagnostic immunoassays will be discussed as the third application, however, the overlapping field of nanomaterials in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, while fascinating, is too large to topic to discuss here and as such is beyond the scope of this chapter.