It is an emerging multidisciplinary field to look for the reparation, improvement, and maintenance of cells, tissues, and organs by applying cell therapy and tissue engineering methods. With the help of nanotechnology it is possible to interact with cell components, to manipulate the cell proliferation and differentiation, and the production and organization of extracellular matrices.
Present day nanomedicine exploits carefully structured nanoparticles such as dendrimers, carbon fullerenes (buckyballs), and nanoshells to target specific tissues and organs. These nanoparticles may serve as diagnostic and therapeutic antiviral, antitumor, or anticancer agents. Years ahead, complex nanodevices and even nanorobots will be fabricated, first of biological materials but later using more durable materials such as diamond to achieve the most powerful results.
Within 10–20 years it should become possible to construct machines on the micrometer scale made up of parts on the nanometer scale. Subassemblies of such devices may include such as useful robotic components as 100 nm manipulater arms, 10 nm sorting rotors for molecule by molecule reagent purification, and smooth super hard surfaces made of automically flawless diamond.
Nanocomputers would assume the important task of activating, controlling, and deactivating such nanomechanical devices. Nanocomputers would store and execute mission plans, receive and process external signals and stimuli, communicate with other nanocomputers or external control and monitoring devices, and possess contextual knowledge to ensure safe functioning of the nanomechanical devices. Such technology has enormous medical and dental implications.
Programmable nanorobotic devices would allow physicians to perform precise interventions at the cellular and molecular level. Medical nanorobots have been proposed for genotological applicatons in pharmaceuticals research, clinical diagnosis, and in dentistry, and also mechanically reversing atherosclerosis, improving respiratory capacity, enabling near-instantaneous homeostasis, supplementing immune system, rewriting or replacing DNA sequences in cells, repairing brain damage, and resolving gross cellular insults whether caused by irreversible process or by cryogenic storage of biological tissues.
Feynman offered the first known proposal for a nanorobotic surgical procedure to cure heart disease, “A friend of mine (Albert R. Hibbs) suggests a very interesting possibility for relatively small machines. He says that, although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and looks around. It finds out which valve is the faulty and takes a little knife and slices it out, that we can manufacture an object that maneuvers at that level, other small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some inadequately functioning organs”.
Many disease causing culprits such as bacteria and viruses are nanosize. So, it only makes sense that nanotechnology would offer us ways of fighting back. The ancient greeks used silver to promote healing and prevent infection, but the treatment took backseat when antibiotics came on the scene. Nycryst pharmaceuticals (Canada) revived and improved an old cure by coating a burn and wound bandage with nanosize silver particles that are more reactive than the bulk form of metal. They penetrate into skin and work steadily. As a result, burn victims can have their dressings changed just once a week.
