Nanotechnology promises to revolutionize medicine, according to this article, particularly when it comes to identifying illnesses more quickly. Supersensitive materials composed of nanoparticles are being developed that are capable of recognizing disease markers at much lower concentrations than today’s equipment can detect – meaning diseases can be caught and treated much earlier. Dr. Chad A. Mirkin, director of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for Integrated Nanopatterning and Detection Technologies at Northwestern University, United States, said, “Nanotechnology is changing the way the medical diagnostics field approaches disease detection. The science has led to technology that has huge advantages in terms of detection, with highly sensitive ways of screening for diseases.” Researchers at Northwestern, along with partners at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Argonne National Laboratory, are developing screening techniques that use gold nanoparticles to identify if key disease markers are visible in a drop of blood. “If you put a drop of blood on the chip, the right marker will go to the right spot. The molecules will reach out and grab the disease markers if they are present,” Mirkin explains. “But you can’t see it because it’s a molecule. If you treat the chip with these gold particles, the gold particle will go to the spots where the marker is positive. When the markers are present, they will turn red in color.” Early versions of the technology are already in commercial use, says Mirkin, and the research offers the possibility of finding diseases that now are almost impossible to detect until it’s too late. Nanotechnology, adds Mirkin, “is going to be everywhere. Creating highly sensitive ways of screening for diseases is going to change the way the medical profession operates, and will make a tremendous difference in the outcome for millions of patients.”
http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2011/07/19/nanotechnology-transforms-disease-detection