Nanomedicine can be more than a case of adding a trendy label to traditional approaches to pharmaceuticals.
"Nanomedicine" first reared its head 40 years ago in the film, Fantastic Voyage. (The film makers then recruited Isaac Asimov to turn it into a book.) More recently, there have been a few attempts to use the label to make traditional biomedical research look trendy.
While you could describe most drugs research as nanotechnology, that is the after all about the size of the molecules they use, there are some genuine new applications of small size to drug development. If nothing else, just thinking nano can freshen up approaches to R&D. That's why we looked with interest at a paper in Molecular Pharmaceutics, with the mind bending title "Diacyllipid Micelle-Based Nanocarrier for Magnetically Guided Delivery of Drugs in Photodynamic Therapy".
We can do no better than lift a couple of sentences in a recent issue of American Chemical Society (ACS) News Service Press Package. "The great promise of nanomedicine in opening a new era in diagnosis and treatment of disease depends heavily on the availability of versatile nanocarriers. The ultra-small counterparts of hypodermic syringes and IVs, nanocarriers are the containers that will carry and deliver nanodiagnostic and nanotherapeutics to their targets inside the human body."
The first sentence of the abstract of the paper, by teams from the State University of New York at Buffalo, says: "We report the design, synthesis using nanochemistry, and characterization of a novel multifunctional polymeric micelle-based nanocarrier system, which demonstrates combined function of magnetophoretically guided drug delivery together with light-activated photodynamic therapy."
It then turns into some hairy chemistry, culminating in the conclusion that "incorporating a magnetic moiety in a nanocarrier formulation can unequivocally offer an additional degree of freedom for targeted drug delivery and consequent therapeutic efficacy".
Looks like there could be some innovation opportunities in this area after all. Nanomedicine can be more than a rebadging exercise.
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