Nanotechnology vs diseases

西尔维亚Sonzini药物德尔ivery scientist at AstraZeneca who has been working on creating different ways of using nanotechnology to deliver medicines for different diseases. She explained to Sally Le Page where we're at with using nanotech inside the body...

Sally - Silvia, we've just been hearing about nanorobots. So are you also building, tiny, shiny little robots that float around in your blood delivering medicines?

Silvia - No. Well, we are really not working on that. Nanomedicines are quite far from being a robot like material, but nanomedicine are drug delivery systems. You can imagine them as a polymeric or oily particles that are carrying around active molecules in our body, and really allowing them to reach the tissue of interest and even into the disease cells.

Sally - So you say that they're tiny particles, how big are these things compared with our human cells?

Silvia - They're very, very tiny. They're about 100x smaller than a cell, and there are many different size of nanomedicine. It's difficult to say specifically one size, but really they're so small compared to that many can be eaten by each cell at once.

Sally - Presumably they must be quite tricky to make and quite expensive. Why would you want to use nanomedicine rather than just injecting the drug into someone's bloodstream? Like we've been doing for hundreds of years.

Silvia - I can't really discuss too much about why they're expensive or not, but really nanomedicine are at the forefront of medicine. They allow us to bring specific molecules to a specific part of our bodies and really reach some target that wouldn't be able to be reached in other ways with the standard drug molecules.

Sally - How can they recognize one cell over another? Katie was just talking about them, targeting cancer cells. How can something so small recognize a difference between a cancerous cell and a healthy cell?

Silvia - We are using an active targeting system, which means we are adding a biological part on top of our nanomedicine that can interact with a lock and key mechanism with the disease cells. So it can really discern between disease and healthy cells.

Sally - Is this all just science fiction or is any of it being used already?

Silvia - No, actually there are some nanomedicine already on the market and many are in the clinic. We have two in the clinic right now, and many more than are going through preclinical and clinical studies at the moment.