Nanotechnology: A Promising Future for the Medical Market

Nanotechnology has been the growing focus of exciting research and discovery for more than a decade. And experts are expecting that nanometer particles will become a lot more important in the future than they already are today. A huge market for medical products is being predicted for the coming decades, as nanotechnology promises great progress in medicine. The National Science Foundation, for instance, estimates that the worldwide market for products with nanotechnology components will reach $1 trillion by 2015.

A team of German and American researchers has now developed a new method for the production of nanoscopic gold nanorods for medical applications. Gold nanoparticles have been considered for various biomedical applications, such as tumor treatment. While previous methods have been promising, they could not be achieved without the use of cytotoxic additives. As cancer cells are quite sensitive to temperature, one of the methods, photoinduced hyperthermia, uses light energy that is converted into heat. Gold nanoparticles strongly absorb light in the near infrared, which causes the gold particles to vibrate. The light energy is then dissipated into the surrounding areas as heat. And since the gold particles can be functionalized to bind to tumor cells, only cells that contain gold particles are being killed off. The only problem with this method though is that ordinary spherical particles don’t efficiently convert the light into heat – only rod-shaped particles do. And the additives that are needed to crystallize the rod-shaped particles from aqueous solutions unfortunately are cytotoxic.

But the research team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Hunter College in New York, and the RWTH Aachen University in Germany is now pursuing a new strategy, without the use of cytotoxic additives. Instead of using an aqueous solution, the team chose an ionic liquid for crystallization. Because ionic liquids are “liquid salts,” organic compounds that exist as oppositely charged ions, but in the liquid state, the researchers were able to produce gold nanorods without the use of cytotoxic additives.

Tags: cancer treatment, golden rods, Nanotechnology and Microtechnology