Nanotechnology is creating new opportunities for fighting disease – from delivering drugs in smart packaging to nanobots powered by the world’s tiniest engines.
One way that researchers are attempting to improve the safety and efficacy of drugs, such as those used to treat cancer, is to use a relatively new area of research known as nanothrapeutics to target drug delivery just to the cells that need it.
Professor Sir Mark Welland is Head of the Electrical Engineering Division at Cambridge. In recent years, his research has focused on nanotherapeutics, working in collaboration with clinicians and industry to develop better, safer drugs. He and his colleagues don’t design new drugs; instead, they design and build smart packaging for existing drugs.
Using clever chemistry and engineering at the nanoscale, drugs can be ‘taught’ to behave like a Trojan horse, or to hold their fire until just the right moment, or to recognise the target they’re looking for.
“There are a huge number of possibilities right now, and probably more to come, which is why there’s been so much interest,” says Welland. "Designing these particles, loading them with drugs and making them clever so that they release their cargo in a controlled and precise way: it’s quite a technical challenge."
Welland’s group is working with MedImmune, the biologics R&D arm of pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, to study the stability of drugs and to design ways to deliver them more effectively using nanotechnology.
Seperately, Professor Jeremy Baumberg and colleagues in Cambridge and the University of Bath are aiming to produce nanomachines which may in the future help to keep us healthy by patrolling, monitoring and repairing the body. They have developed the world’s tiniest engine – just a few billionths of a metre in size. It’s biocompatible, cost-effective to manufacture, fast to respond and energy efficient.
Working with Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm, the team in Cambridge's Nanophotonics Centre hopes to commercialise the technology for microfluidics bio-applications.
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