Volume 3, Issue 1 
1st Quarter, 2008


Nanotechnology and Life Sciences

Challa Kumar, Ph.D.

Page 2 of 4

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Image 6      

When we examine the moth's eye using the traditional electron microscope technique, we would realize it has some very interesting nanostructures, and that is what is responsible for the behavior of the eye.

image 7
Image 7
     

When you look at this beautiful Monarch Butterfly, you see beautiful colors; different colors of the butterflies which are shown in nature. What you see here is the wing of the Morpho butterfly, and those colors are due to the nanostructure, which is responsible for the tint in the blue line.  

Having learned all these lessons from nature, we are slowly trying to mimic nature. Trying to see how best we can incorporate the nanostructure process of the materials in nature, and how to convert them to our advantage.  A recent publication of Nature and Nanotechnology [1] describes how a tobacco mosaic virus conjugated with nanoparticles is being developed as a digital memory device (Nature Nanotechnology 72(1), 72-77, 2006).

What good example is greater than the human body itself?  The human body is an array of various nanotechnological materials and nanotechnological principles, so the human body is really an epitome of the advantages that nanoscience and nanotechnology can offer.        

Having really looked at what the life sciences offer in nature, man is trying to translate those into the laboratory.  When you look at the manmade nanotechnologies of what we have today, one could literally make a variety of different sizes and shapes of these nanomaterials.

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Image 8 [click above for larger image]
       

You have rods, nanocubes, nanotetrapods, carbon nanotubes, nanowires, nanofiber,   nanoplates, and so on.  These are all being made on a commercial scale in laboratories.

The commercial potential of the advantage is very obvious.  Look at the way the carbon nanotubes are being developed for a variety of products for their unique and excellent properties being the lightest and yet the hardest material ever known to humankind.

The technologies that are being developed in terms of biomedical applications are multifunctional polymeric nanoparticle platforms; nanosensors for in vitro bio-analysis, drug delivery, and diagnosis, and so forth.         

There are also technologies that are close to commercialization or already commercialized. For example, the technology that has been recently commercialized in Japan is a drug delivery system for topical applications.  This is a nano-based technology that really changes fine wrinkles of an aged hairless mouse. The treatment helped in ridding the wrinkles (Pharm Tech Japan   (2005), 21 (12, Rinji Zokang), 2000-2004).

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Image 9 [Click above for larger image]
       

Another very interesting nanostructured material that is being developed for integrated cancer imaging and therapy is silica core gold shell nanoparticles.    

The beauty of these materials, the way they are being designed, is that by just tuning the optical properties of near-infrared rays, one image the tumor, as well as subject it to thermal therapy.  These technologies are, again, under commercial development (C.Loo et al 2005).

One of the papers that I am very fond of and citing all the time was published in 2005 -- it's “An Elegant Design of Polymeric core-shell Nanoparticles for the Treatment of Angiogenesis.”[2] The design is so elegant that it has shown tremendous promise in the mice studies, and is currently under development for human trials. Once injected into the bloodstream, the core-shell particle is selectively taken up into tumor tissues, where the lipid layer rapidly releases a drug that kills endothelial cells and disrupts blood vessels. The inner core gradually releases a chemotherapeutic drug to destroy the cancer cells.  (Sengupta et al 2005).

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Image 10 [Click above for larger image]        

This brings us back to my own laboratory where we are trying to engineer new site specific, controlled released drug delivery systems what my colleague, Professor Leuschner [3], described as integrating the LHRH Ligand Based Therapy [4] for controlled release of anticancer drugs.

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Image 11 [Click above for larger image]
       

This release is unique in the sense that we are trying to have a magnetically modulated controlled release.  Wherein one could, in principle, have a three-pronged approach targeted and controlled release delivery of anticancer drugs.

 

 

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Footnotes

1. Nature Nanotechnology Magazine – "Digital memory device based on tobacco mosaic virus conjugated with nanoparticles."
www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v1/n1/pdf/nnano.2006.55.pdf  January 22, 2008 3:32PM EST

2. “An Elegant Design of Polymer Prolepsis Nanoparticles for the Treatment of Angiogenesis.”
http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/110/10/1219
  January 22, 2008 4:53PM EST

3. Carola Leuschner, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor, William Hansel Cancer Prevention, Pennington Biomedical Research Center at the University of Louisiana.  
/www.pbrc.edu/...  January 23, 2008 11:32AM EST

4. LHRH Ligand Based Therapy – “[B]reast cancers and their metastases can be targeted through their LHRH (luteinizing hormone releasing hormone) receptors.”
Further information available at:
http://www.nsti.org/procs/Nanotech2005v1/1/M57.03  January 23, 2008 11:38AM EST

 

 

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