Can you pass me nano-milk for my nano-coffee, please?

Have you heard anything about nanomedicine? Ok, about application of nanotechnology in drug development? I have heard a lot but I do not clearly understand the situation. And why nobody is saying about micromedicine? What is a difference between nano- and micromedicine? Let us take it from the beginning: I will use Wikipedia (well, excuse me – I know that it is bad taste to use Wikipedia but Wikipedia represents a so-called “common” knowledge which is quite acceptable at the current time – today is 2012-03-12 so all the quotes are copied today ).

So:

“Nanomedicine is the medical application of nanotechnology.^[1] Nanomedicine ranges from the medical applications of nanomaterials, to nanoelectronic biosensors, and even possible future applications of molecular nanotechnology.” – (There is also a lot of other “relevant” information in the article such as:

·         “Drug delivery” § with very much dared statement: “More than $65 billion are wasted each year due to poor bioavailability.” – Well, should anybody comment that?...

·         Nanorobots § - I promise to come to this issue later on…

·         Cell repair machines § - no comments

… and a lot of other stuff which exploded my brain!

Ok, let’s go back to nanomedicine. Nothing clear with it so we go further to nanomaterials and nanotechnology.

“Nanomaterials is a field that takes a materials science-based approach to nanotechnology. It studies materials with morphological features on the nanoscale, and especially those that have special properties stemming from their nanoscale dimensions. Nanoscale is usually defined as smaller than a one tenth of a micrometer in at least one dimension,^[1] though this term is sometimes also used for materials smaller than one micrometer.” – Basically nothing important and interesting.

“Nanotechnology (sometimes shortened to "nanotech") is the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with developing materials, devices, or other structures possessing at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometres. Quantum mechanical effects are important at this quantum-realm scale.” – Here we have a magic statement which describes the main difference between nano- and other suffixes or prefixes: only nano-scale can provide something which is not deliverable by milli and micro – QANTUM PROPERTIES.

Well, it became clearer now: if we will distinct something which is manufactured in nano-scale AND possesses quantum properties from the rest of materials despite that they just  are made in nano-scale  - only in that case we should use the term “nano”. This is my suggestion. It is rational. Otherwise we can add “nano-“ to almost everything due to every material and object contains something in nano-scale, like coffee, milk, beer etc.

But let’s go back to the medicine and drug development. Can anybody imagine application of quantum properties to drug? What in the world does it mean – quantum properties of the drug? Is it correct to refer “quantum properties” to the drugs in the first place? Drugs acts on their targets at the molecular level – it cannot be altered.  So the only thing that we should do is just to agree that:

Nanomedicine is a field of medicine which works with drug objects in nano-scale.  

Well, not so sexy but very simple and rational.

  

Pictures are taken from http://science.kukuchew.com/category/nanotechnology/