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Vastly reduced component sizes resulting
from nanoengineering could enable complete surgical robots or miniature medical
devices to be constructed. The picture below is, just an artists representation
of a drug delivery nanodevice but it is expected within the nanotech community
that this level of miniaturization will become possible.
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One major future application of
nanotechnology may be the targeted delivery of drugs to specific organs or
tissues e.g. for the treatment of cancers at their site rather than the use of
systemic and often highly toxic chemotherapy. Another possible application could
be the delivery to specific sites of coated nanoparticles that could then be
heated using intense light thereby destroying diseased tissue and cells.
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Nanotechnology also offers considerable
promise in the rapidly developing field of human tissue engineering. The below
figure is an artist’s representation of an engineered human nerve cell
utilizing a matrix formed of an nanoengineered biodegradable biopolymer
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