Nanomedicine
Burgeoning interest in the medical applications of nanotechnology has led to the emergence of a new field called nanomedicine. Most broadly, nanomedicine is the process of diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease and traumatic injury, of relieving pain, and of preserving and improving human health, using molecular tools and molecular knowledge of the human body.
It is most useful to regard the emerging field of nanomedicine as a set of three mutually overlapping and progressively more powerful technologies. First, in the relatively near term, nanomedicine can address many important medical problems by using nanoscale-structured materials with biological systems.
Nanostructured materials and devices hold great promise for advanced diagnostics and biosensors, targeted drug delivery and smart drugs, and immunoisolation therapies.
Second, biotechnology offers the benefits of molecular medicine via genomics, proteomics, and artificial engineered microbes. Third, in the longer term, molecular machine systems and medical nanorobots will allow instant pathogen diagnosis and extermination, chromosome replacement and individual cell surgery in vivo, and the efficient augmentation and improvement of natural physiological function.
Current research is exploring the fabrication of designed nanostructures, nanoactuators and nanomotors, microscopic energy sources, and nanocomputers at the molecular scale, along with the means to assemble them into larger systems, economically and in great numbers.
Nanomedicine is poised for growth and shall prove extremely helpful for humanity.
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