Medicine on a small scale

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Abstract
Over the past few years, nanotechnology has emerged as a new and exciting research field that deals with the design, synthesis and fabrication of structures at the molecular scale. Smallness is not in itself the prime goal; it is rather the expectation that, by manipulating matter at the molecular level, new intrinsic material properties can be created. Because living matter itself is basically composed of biological ‘nanomachines’ and nanostructures, researchers recognized quite early on that biology and medicine could be prime fields for the application of nanotechnology. In general, nanomedicine can be defined as the monitoring, repairing, construction and control of human biological systems at the cellular level by using materials and structures engineered at the molecular level. It encompasses much more than just being an extension of ‘molecular medicine’, and future products and developments may have extraordinary and far‐reaching implications for the definition, diagnosis and treatment of disease, and for how medicine is practised (Freitas, 2002). The main interests currently lie in improving diagnostic methods and in developing better drug delivery systems to improve disease therapy. More generally, the scientific community is increasingly focusing its attention on the novel chemical and physical properties of nano‐sized materials to develop new applications in regard to human health. > Nanomedicine can be defined as the monitoring, repairing, construction and control of human biological systems at the cellular level by using materials and structures engineered at the molecular level Nanotechnology today deals mainly with two rather different but complementary types of material: nano‐sized structures (or nanoparticles) and nanoporous materials. There are already some exciting developments in the field of diagnostics based on the use of nanoparticles, in particular fluorescent semiconductor quantum dots (QDs). QDs are monodisperse inorganic nanocrystalline particles made from semiconducting material and are typically 2–10 nm in size—about the size of a …