Applications of Nanotechnology in Medical Science

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What is Nanotechnology

Study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale.

Deals with developing materials, devices, or other structures possessing at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100.

Father of Nanotechnology: Richard E. Smalley/Richard Feynman.

Applications in Medical Science


Drug Delivery: It involves employing nanoparticles to deliver drugs, heat, light or other substances to specific types of cells (such as cancer cells).

Particles are engineered so that they are attracted to diseased cells, which allows direct treatment of those cells.

This technique reduces damage to healthy cells in the body and allows for earlier detection of disease.

For example, nanoparticles that deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to cancer cells are under development.


Diagnostic and Imaging Techniques: Quantum Dots (qdots) may be used in the future for locating cancer tumors in patients and in the near term for performing diagnostic tests in samples.

Concerns about the toxicity of the material that quantum dots are made from is one of the reasons restricting the use of quantum dots in human patients. However, work is being done with quantum dots composed of silicon, which is believed to be less toxic than the cadmium contained in many quantum dots.