Drug delivery and Nanobiotechnology........

The emergence of nanotechnology is likely to have a significant impact on drug delivery sector, affecting just about every route of administration from oral to injectable, according to specialist market research firm NanoMarkets.
And the payoff for doctors and patients should be lower drug toxicity, reduced cost of treatments, improved bioavailability and an extension of the economic life of proprietary drugs, according to Michael Moradi, an associate analyst at the company."This is an impressive list [but] also impressive is the fact that many of the categories of nano-enabled drug delivery systems are already close to or at the point of marketing," unlike many of the 'futuristic' applications claimed for nanomedicine, he said.
NanoMarkets expects the dosing benefits of nano-enabled drug delivery systems to be extended to compounds used in treating both infectious disease and cancer, and has identified six types of drug delivery systems in which nanotechnology is likely to have a significant impact.
For injectable drugs, nanotechnology is already generating new dosage forms that are easier to administer, more pleasant for the patient receive and confer a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
For example, at the start of 2005, Johnson & Johnson revealed that Elan's NanoCrystal technology would be used in a Phase III clinical trial for an injectable formulation of paliperidone palmitate, a drug for schizophrenia, notes Moradi. This is a new 'nano formulation' of an older drug which overcomes the original's insolubility, by reducing the particle size to under 200 nm.
Nanotechnology is also opening up new opportunities in implantable delivery systems, which are often preferable to the use of injectable drugs, because the latter frequently display first-order kinetics (the blood concentration goes up rapidly, but drops exponentially over time). This rapid rise may cause difficulties with toxicity, and drug efficacy can diminish as the drug concentration falls below the targeted range.
In contrast, implantable time release systems may help minimize peak plasma levels and reduce the risk of adverse reactions, allow for more predictable and extended duration of action, reduce the frequency of re-dosing and improve patient acceptance and compliance.
Nanotechnology adds to these the benefits, says Moradi. Citing pSivida's BioSilicon product, he notes that this nanostructured material effectively stores an active compound in nanosised pockets that release minute amounts of drug as the silicon dissolves. pSivida is currently exploring biodegradable implantable methods for tissue engineering and ophthalmic delivery.
Nano-implants will also be used in the not-too-distant future for treating cancer. Among the first nanoscale devices to show promise in anti-cancer therapeutics and drug delivery are structures called nanoshells, which NanoMarkets believes may afford a degree of control never before seen in implantable drug delivery products.
Nanoshells typically have a silicon core that is sealed in an outer metallic core. By manipulating the ratio of wall to core, the shells can be precisely tuned to scatter or absorb very specific wavelengths of light. For example, gold encased nanoshells have been used to convert light into heat, enabling the destruction of tumours by selective binding to malignant cells. A physician can use infrared rays to pass harmlessly through soft tissue, while initiating a lethal application of heat when the nanoshells are excited.

Vote for your favorite Nano-Art work

NanoArt is a new art discipline at the intersections of Art, Science and Technology, and relates to the micro or nanosculptures (atomic and molecular sculptures) created by artists or scientists through chemical or physical processes and visualized with powerful research tools like scanning electron or atomic force microscopes. The scientific images of these structures are captured and further processed using different artistic techniques to convert them into artworks showcased for large audiences.
37 nanoartists from 13 countries and 4 continents sent 121 NanoArt works to this second edition of the international competition. Public online voting is now open through March 31, 2008 at www.nanoart21.org. Judging is via the Internet and decided by the site visitors. This site was founded by the artist and scientist Cris Orfescu (www.absolutearts.com/nanoart) to promote worldwide the NanoArt as a reflection of the technological movement. NanoArt is a more appealing and effective way to communicate with the general public and to inform people about the new technologies of the 21st Century and should raise the public's awareness of Nanotechnology and its impact on our lives.
To vote for your favorite NanoArt work you can also visit directly the competition albums' site at http://nanoart21.org/index.html and follow these 3 easy steps:
1. click on the album s thumbnail to open album
2. click on the artwork s thumbnail to see the large image
3. click on the number of stars you would like to rank that artwork

Scientists create beating heart in laboratory

University of Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory.
By using a process called whole organ decellularization, scientists from the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The research has been published online in the January 13 issue of Nature Medicine.
“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,” said Doris Taylor, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair, Medtronic Bakken professor of medicine and physiology, and principal investigator of the research.
Nearly 5 million people live with heart failure, and about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year in the United States. Approximately 50,000 United States patients die annually waiting for a donor heart.
It seems decellularization may be a solution – essentially using nature’s platform to create a bioartifical heart, she said. Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ – in this case an animal cadaver heart – leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.

After successfully removing all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow. The results were very promising, Taylor said. Four days after seeding the decellularized heart scaffolds with the heart cells, contractions were observed. Eight days later, the hearts were pumping.
“Take a section of this ‘new heart’ and slice it, and cells are back in there,” Taylor said. “The cells have many of the markers we associate with the heart and seem to know how to behave like heart tissue.”


“We just took nature’s own building blocks to build a new organ,” said Harald C. Ott, M.D., co-investigator of the study and a former research associate in the center for cardiovascular repair, who now works at Massachusetts General Hospital. “When we saw the first contractions we were speechless.”
Researchers are optimistic this discovery could help increase the donor organ pool.
In general, the supply of donor organs is limited and once a heart is transplanted, individuals face life-long immunosuppression, often trading heart failure for high blood pressure, diabetes, and kidney failure, Taylor said.
Researchers hope that the decellularization process could be used to make new donor organs. Because a new heart could be filled with the recipient’s cells, researchers hypothesize it’s much less likely to be rejected by the body. And once placed in the recipient, in theory the heart would be nourished, regulated, and regenerated similar to the heart that it replaced.
“We used immature heart cells in this version, as a proof of concept. We pretty much figured heart cells in a heart matrix had to work,” Taylor said. “Going forward, our goal is to use a patient’s stem cells to build a new heart.”
Although heart repair was the first goal during research, decellularization shows promising potential to change how scientists think about engineering organs, Taylor said.
“It opens a door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas – you name it and we hope we can make it,” she said.
Researchers of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair team were assisted in their study by researchers from the University of Minnesota Department of Biomedical Engineering, who helped analyze data.

NanoBio - recent advances

NANOBIOTECH ·First 'nano' technologies yield fruit in the lab and clinic with the promise of more to come.From R&D analysis and pathogen detection to clinical diagnosis and drug delivery, the biomedical applications of nanotechnology, while still in their infancy, are starting to yield real results. While much of the work is the province of academia, increasingly clinical labs as well as biotech and pharmaceutical companies are getting involved. Among several recent notable announcements:

· Johnson & Johnson and Roche licensed Elan's NanoCrystal technology, which enhances the performance of drugs with poor water-solubility.

· Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital announced in PLoS Medicine that an injectable solution of magnetic nanoparticles can be used to track cancer in patients, reducing the need for surgery.

Technology and Mankind..........

In some 200 years or so, nanotechnology and Bio technology, many of which we have no inkling of at this time, will have allowed us to abandon our limited, short lived, mortal bodies. When mankind achieves immortality on their own, with no relying on the off chance that this or that superstition might gain you some mythical heaven, will collapse. Nanotechnology and similar technologies will find, and undo the flaws that evolution left us that causes, aging and eventual death. We will invent new manners of temporal existance. We will be able to enhance our senses, we will enhance our understanding of the Universe by enhancing our minds in ways that would take evolution tens of millions of years to do, if it ever did. We will be able to plug into the wisdom and scince of mankind in a more direct manner that going to a library, lack of rationality will no longer be welcome in comparison to rational science that will give us immortality and the Universe as our immoratl playground.

History Of Nano-Biotechnology

By the 1990s, scientists began to design experiments to specifically couple biology with nanofabricated devices and tools. Though the length scales were compatible, there were significant challenges involved. Biological systems are fundamentally wet and organic, whereas most nanofabricated systems are hydrophobic and made of inorganic materials (usually silicon-based). Though ideas of nanobiotechnology had circulated among the scientific community and general public for many years, actual progress in this field only began when the initial seminal advances of each contributory field (biotechnology and nanotechnology) had come to fruition by the early 1990s. These developments attracted many scientists interested in the interface between the two. However, one major problem was how to physically couple the two divergent systems. Some scientists circumvented this problem by creating nanomachines made solely of natural molecules; two notable examples were Nadrian Seeman's complex 3-D structures created solely of DNA and Leonard Adleman's utilization of DNA to perform computation. Others discovered or developed new coupling chemistries in order to covalently bond organic and inorganic substrates. The collaboration of scientists from both fields has been important for refining tools used for nanobiotechnology and in building the path towards functional hybrid devices. For example, Carlo Montemagno of UCLA recently created hybrid nanomachines composed of an inorganic nanopropeller with a biomolecular motor that could use adenosine triphosphate (ATP) for energy. Other device researchers have created more complex hybrid functional micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) and even nano-electro mechanical systems (NEMS) devices composed of a combination of synthetic and biological components.