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Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Biology and Medicine

Nanoscience and nanotechnology refers to the understanding and control of matter at the atomic, molecular or macromolecular levels, at the length scale of approximately 1 - 100 nanometers. Nanotechnology emerges from the physical, chemical, biological, and engineering sciences, where novel tools and techniques are being developed to probe and manipulate single atoms and molecules. These tools have already enabled a myriad of new discoveries of how the properties of matter are governed by the atomic and molecular arrangements at nanometer dimensions. These discoveries have impacted manufacturing processes of a wide range of materials and devices resulting in substantial improvements of existing technology as well as entirely new technological innovations. For example, nanolithography is a very active area of research used to fabricate nanometer-scale structures, meaning patterns with at least one lateral dimension between the size of an individual atom and approximately 100 nm. Other areas include atomic layer deposition and scanning probe microscopy coupled with corresponding advances in supramolecular chemistry. The ability to control the design properties of materials and devices at the nanoscale is also possible by exploiting strategies that are frequently complemented by bottom up engineering approaches. With the state-of-the-art engineering techniques in materials science today, nanoscience and nanotechnology-based approaches are well poised to revolutionize research in biology and medicine.

Studies that employ nanotechnology techniques and concepts and are focused on biological processes will also give completely new insights into the physical relationships between cellular components and functional irregularities that trigger pathological abnormities. Here, nanotechnology and nanoscience offer a means to control the design and assembly of biomolecular processes relevant in health and disease. For example, the processes involved in energy conversion have been studied for many years through enzymology and structural biology, advances in the development and adaptation of nanotechnology and nanoscience-based approaches have the potential to construct a biomolecular machine that uses biological energy sources such as ATP or electrochemical gradients in novel ways. The successful design and development of such biomolecular machines would demonstrate understanding of a key biological process and create opportunities for interventions based on engineering principles. Ultimately, it will be possible to understand cells from a genetic, biochemical, physiological, and engineering perspective, thus enabling the fabrication of nanoscale modules de novo for therapeutic applications. The nanoscale engineering principles derived could also lead to novel bioinspired systems and architectures, such as biocompatible nanomachines incorporating polymer-based motility inspired by lessons learned from the study of biological models.

Nanotechnology can also be used to design multi-functional and multi-analyte diagnostic systems that not only define early stage changes or progression to a disease state, but also allow the identification of unique biological molecules, chemicals and structures not addressable by current assays. Nascent nanotechnology-based imaging agents for inflammation, metastasis, and angiogenesis are also emerging while nanoscale multifunctional materials, capitalizing on progress in genomics and proteomics, allow targeted delivery of molecular therapies with enhanced efficacy. Significant progress in the engineering of nanoprobes for imaging of cellular events, nanosensors to identify multi-functional analytes create opportunities to observe phenomena at the molecular level and allow researchers to study the function of biomolecules, supramolecular assemblies and organelles of living cells for further manipulation. Despite such emerging technologies, much more progress is still needed to adapt and translate nanoscience and nanotechnology solutions to biomedical innovation and applications.

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