11. Some future nanotechnology medical product ideas:

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.

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.

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.

Nanotechnology offers great promise for genetic therapy – by facilitating the sorting of cells outside the body for re-injection or by enabling the building of cell-assisting micro-machines at the cell or sub-cell size scale