The Future Of Nanotechnology In The Medical World

Through all the innovations and successful achievements made by mankind, from the creation of the first automobile to landing on the moon, our ability to explore the impossible as led us as a species to grow exponentially. However, within the next 50 years, mankind will yet again make another breakthrough, but this time, through nanotechnology. Within five decades, healthcare and medicine combined with nanotechnology and biotechnology will revolutionize medicine in the world. The impact of nanotechnology would be expected to be even greater than the influences of computer engineering, medical imaging, and antibiotics have done within the past 100 years. Imagine being able to cure any disease within the human body. Technology today does not yet possess the ability to do so, but with advancements in nanotechnology, this soon can become a reality. When trying to eliminate cancer cells, for example, doctors are trying to kill the tumor cells within the body. Unfortunately, the only treatment today is chemotherapy, which has the negative side effect of killing both tumor and regular cells.

Nanotechnology, with further research and significant progress, can offer doctors a way to directly influence the human body down to a single cell. By using intelligent operating nanobots too small to physically interfere with human body functions, doctors could potentially be able to kill the tumor cells without having any impact on the healthy cells and organs in the body, therefore being able to safely and successfully remove cancer cells in the body. By programming these nanorobots to release chemotherapy only when they encounter cells and tissues associated with tumor cells, chemotherapy will be revolutionized to where it will minimize or completely eliminate the side effects. Daniel Levner, a bioengineer at Harvard, stated “DNA nanorobots could potentially carry out complex programs that could one day be used to diagnose or treat diseases with unprecedented sophistication”.

Another Field of medicine in which nanotechnology can revolutionize would be medical data collection. With nanotechnology, specifically nanorobots, doctors can insert these nano-scale devices into the body and can record chemical changes in the body immediately, allowing doctors to have a “real time” tracking of a patients health and progress at any time. This development has a number of benefits as a patient suffering or experiencing a change that could result in death can get the required aid needed on call at that moment, instead of waiting for it to happen and then calling for help. This can help save countless lives, and this is another reason why nanotechnology will revolutionize the medical field as we know it. With the progression of nanotechnology, within the next fifty years, if developers can continue to miniaturize the nanorobots, these devices could be built to map the whole body and deliver results to doctors. The data from such devices could contain information down to the capillaries, giving us a different perspective that can’t be seen with a MRI or x-ray. Such a device is being developed by scientist Frank Boehm, and it would be called the “Vascular Cartographic Scanning Nanodevice”. Frank Boehm went on to say “Nano-medical diagnostics and therapeutics operate at cellular and molecular levels, precisely where many disease processes find their genesis… Nanomedicine has the potential for diagnosing and treating many conditions preemptively, before they have the opportunity to proliferate…It is conceivable that they will be imbued with capacities for the highly accurate diagnoses and meticulous and thorough eradication of virtually any disease state, pathogenic or toxic threat”.

Neuroscience combined with nanotechnology can have the potential to treat brain disorders and other conditions as well. With nano-scale devices implanted within the brain, doctors and neuroscientist will be able to get reports on their patients neural activity and even begin to heal the brain in the areas needed. Doctors could bock neural circuits to certain regions to the brain or even use nano-devices to send drugs to the brain to help their patient with certain conditions. Although there are many risks involving nanotechnology and its unknown effects on the body, if done correctly and efficiently, nanotechnology can and will revolutionize the medical world, prolonging lives and treating diseases that many to this day have failed to accomplish.