Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Betting on Nanotech Therapies

I'm hoping nanotechnology comes up with some breakthroughs...

"There's an entire wave of important therapeutics [coming] using nanotechnology," said Jim Matheson, general partner of Flagship Ventures, Cambridge, Mass., which is contributing funding for one such venture.

By packaging drugs with nano-agents that home in on tumors directly, several start-ups hope to knock out cancer cells while triggering relatively few side effects. A number of these companies plan to begin clinical trials shortly.

These companies' work represents some of the latest strategies in the long quest to better target drugs with agents known as nanoparticles. A milestone came in 1995 with the U.S. approval of Doxil, which encapsulates the chemotherapy doxorubicin into a tiny fat bubble, or liposome, and another layer of hair-like strands made from a type of rubber.

link to full article

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Cool article! I have written a couple of entries myself on the concept of Nanotechnology, and find it fascinating. A recent article I wrote was more focused on a Star-Trekkish concept. Ever hear of Nanites? They were supposed to be sub-microscopic robots that could perform surgical procedures in the body with high precision. Well, check out my blog article on something that comes close in Switzerland right now:

Microbots: Swiss Precision

Good luck and thanks for the link to the interesting article!