In fact, nanomedicine doesn’t even exist yet. There are only nanoprojects in medicine embodiment of which will lead to the “eternal youth” due to canceling the aging.

Nanotechnology is a more than promising radical solution to the problem of aging. Nanobots can participate (as in addition to genetic engineering, and instead of it) in the redesign of the genome of the cells, changing or adding new genes to improve the functions of the cell.
The important point is that such transformation in the future can be performed on live cells, already existing body, altering the genome of individual cells, in any way to transform the body itself!
Investments in this area (already billions of dollars) are growing rapidly, and some simple techniques of molecular manufacturing are already applying.
Nanotechnology may lead the world into a new technological revolution and completely change not only the economy but also the habitat of man.

It is possible that after improvements to ensure the “eternal youth” nanobots will no longer be needed.
To achieve these goals, humanity must address three main issues:

1. Develop and establish a molecular robots that can repair the molecule.
2. Develop and create nanocomputers, that will “instruct” the nanomachines.
3. Write a complete description of all the molecules in the human body, in other words, create a map of the human body at the atomic level.

The main difficulty with nanotechnology is to create the first nanobots. There are several promising directions.

• One of them is to improve the scanning tunneling microscope or atomic force microscope and achieving a positional accuracy and power grabs.
• Another way to create the first nanobots leads through chemical synthesis. Perhaps the ingenious design and synthesize chemical compounds that are capable of self-assembly in solution.
• The third path leads through biochemistry. Ribosomes (inside cells) are specialized nanobots, and we can use them to create more versatile robots.

With nanotechnologists of the Foresight Institute said that the rapid growth of nanotechnology is out of control, but unlike Bill Joy, instead of a simple ban on the development of research in this area, they proposed to establish government control over the research.
Such oversight can prevent accidental disaster, such as nanobots create themselves (to infinity), consuming as building material all in its path, including plants, animals and people.
Ray Kurzweil predicts that it will be possible to place inside the circulatory system billions of nano-robots the size of a cell  by 2020. According to Robert A. Freitas Jr, a leading scientist in the field of nanomedicine, this will happen only by 2030-2035.
These nanobots will be able to retard the aging process, heal individual cells and interact with individual neurons.

Named “Nano Bansoko” (nano band-aid), the new bandage is between from several tens of nanometers to 1,500 nanometers thick (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). It is more than 1,000 times thinner than a plastic wrap. One side of nano band-aid is highly adhesive and can stick to tissues around wounds, while the other side shows very little tissue adhesion. The bandage, which breaks down naturally after healing, is made from chitosan (a substance derived from chitin found in crab shells) and alginate sodium (produced in kelp slime).

“We will now conduct a detailed safety evaluation in order to put the bandage into practical use in three years,” said professor Shinji Takeoka, who also announced plans to study the use of the bandage on other organs like intestines, as well as in scar prevention on sutured wounds after breast cancer surgery.

“Nanorobotics can play a major role in medical applications, especially for target interventions into the human body through the vascular network,” says Sylvain Martel, director of the nanorobotics laboratory at École Polytechnique de Montréal. ” I believe that nanorobotics could bring new methods and tools to these particular applications.”

While medical molecular machines are not likely to appear soon, there are a great amount of research going into the development of nanoscale robots, and not only for therapeutic use. Can we really use robots at the nano level? Or can we reduce our current machines to that size? We simply do not have the technology yet to make microscopic robotics…

This does not mean that nanomedicine is impossible. Nanomaterials can do anything from improve dental and bone implants, because their mechanical and chemical properties can be tuned to match those of the surrounding tissue, as well as improving medical imaging and better delivering drugs in the body.

Scientists working in this area say the nanorobotic systems could lead to new surgical techniques far more sophisticated and far less invasive than methods currently in use. Such techniques would rely on devices capable to perform diagnostic procedures or repair tissue. “The mechanisms of life operate at the nanoscale,” says Aristides Requicha, director of the laboratory for molecular robotics at the University of Southern California. “If we build devices at their scale, we will be able to interact intimately with them.”

As a discipline, medical nanorobotics remains young for now, but many scientists are already demonstrating new developments they say will form the foundations for the next major breakthroughs in this area. Such breakthroughs could lead to novel applications that offer new ways of accessing small spaces in the human body that would otherwise be unreachable without invasive surgery.

cancer cell

Modern cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy have proven remarkably effective at treating many cancers, especially in combination, but are plagued with toxic side effects. These treatments kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones. Nanotechnology offers the means to aim therapies directly and selectively at cancerous cells.

Chemotherapy employs drugs that are known to kill cancer cells effectively. But these drugs kill healthy cells in addition to tumor cells, leading to adverse side effects such as hair-loss, nausea, neuropathy, fatigue, and compromised immune function.

Nanoparticles can be used to deliver chemotherapeutics medication directly to the tumor while sparing healthy tissue. They can:

• protect drugs from being degraded in the body before they reach their target.
• enhance the absorption of drugs into tumors and into the cancerous cells themselves.
• prevent drugs from interacting with normal cells and avoiding side effects.

Using nanoparticles, drug doses could be much smaller than doses typically used in chemotherapy, making the procedure potentially much safer.

Experiments with mice bearing human breast tumors showed that the injected nanoparticles were readily detected in tumors by using a commercial magnetic resonance imaging scanner within five hours after injection. Scientists kept pancreas and kidney cancers from spreading through the bodies of mice by using tumor-targeting nanoparticles filled with chemotherapy drugs. Although their nanoparticles didn’t affect the original tumor, they did stop the cancers from spreading metastasis.

Patients often don’t die from primary tumors, which can be recognized and treated. Patients die from metastatic disease (for example, when a breast cancer spreads to the liver, the lymph nodes, the brain), which is much more difficult to treat than the primary tumor.

Those patients could theoretically be treated with nano drugs, in the hope that it would prolong the progression of the disease, that the metastatic lesions would slow.

A promising new cancer treatment that may one day replace radiation and chemotherapy is edging closer to human trials.

Nanotechnology

When a person suffers from eye ailments today, nine times out of ten, he will be prescribed eye drops to treat his illness or relieve his discomfort. However, 95 percent of the medication administered in this manner flows to where it is not needed. Most eye medications are delivered by drops. The drops usually mix with tears and drain into the nasal cavity, where they can flow through the blood stream to other organs and cause serious side effects. In addition, dosage through eye drops is inconsistent and difficult to regulate, as most of the drugs are released in an initial burst of concentration.

To counter these problems, researchers have been studying the use of contact lenses to deliver eye medication.

One proposed method was to pre-soak the lenses in the drug solution, while another involved incorporating the drug solution in a hollow cavity made by bonding two separate pieces of lens material. However, neither of these methods proved very effective at delivering medication for extended periods of time.

The new technologies for making lenses involves mixing the drug with a pre-polymer liquid. This mix is then polymerised, creating a transparent contact lens material.

If the drug is water-soluble, it will be trapped within a network of tiny inter-connected, water-filled channels in the material. If it’s water-insoluble, it will be trapped within nano-spaces in the polymer matrix, and slowly leach out into the channels. In contact with fluid on the eyeball, these channels open up and release the drug.

By adapting the water content of the original mix, can be varied the size of the channels and so controlled the rate at which the drug is released.

Moreover, with changes to the size, concentration and structure of the polymeric nanoparticles within the lenses, the drug delivery rate can be controlled and remains effective over longer periods of time.

This new approach could be adapted to deliver glaucoma medication, as this eye disease is particularly hard to treat and existing medications have numerous side effects. The World Health Organization estimates that glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide. Glaucoma is a build-up of pressure in the eye. Experts believe that by using nano-technology, ophthalmologists can find innovative treatment methods for glaucoma.

Some researchers have designed contact lenses that can measure pressure within the eye and relay the data to a computer. It would allow to learn more about glaucoma and improve patient treatment.

Contact lens wearers with dry eyes may also benefit from this invention, as the material can be modified to produce self-lubricating contact lenses.

Nanotechnology

An atom has a diameter of about 0.1 nm. An atom’s nucleus is much smaller – about 0.00001 nm. Atoms are the building blocks for all matter in our universe. You and everything around you are made of atoms. Nature has perfected the science of manufacturing matter molecularly. For instance, our bodies are assembled in a specific manner from millions of living cells. Cells are nature’s nanomachines. At the atomic scale, elements are at their most basic level. On the nanoscale, we can potentially put these atoms together to make almost anything.

You might be surprised to find out how many products on the market are already benefiting from nanotechnology. Upwards of 600 products on store shelves today contain them, including transparent sunscreen, lipsticks, anti-aging creams etc.

• Many sunscreens contain nanoparticles of zinc oxide or titanium oxide. Older sunscreen formulas use larger particles, which is what gives most sunscreens their whitish color. Smaller particles are less visible, meaning that when you rub the sunscreen into your skin, it doesn’t give you a whitish tinge.
• Nanoscale iron oxide powder is now being used as a base material for rouge and lipstick. A French manufacturer, for instance, is working on an experimental lipstick that looks transparent. The lipstick uses layers of nanoparticles to create the illusion that the lipstick changes colors when lighting changes, according to media and analyst reports.
• Anti-aging cream has microscopic nano particles that deliver the vital ingredients directly to where they are needed. The nano-sized emulsified particles in Speciale are just 40 nanometers, while the particles in a regular emulsified cream or lotion are about 5,000 nanometers. It allows the active ingredients to pass through a 50 nanometer cell space to work on the deeper layers of the skin.

For example, L’Oreal, the world’s largest cosmetics company is devoting most of its massive $650 million research budget to nanotechnology presumably because it’s “worth it”.

Nanoscale science and technology could have a continuing impact on biomedical areas such as therapeutics, diagnostic devices, and biocompatible materials for implants and prostheses.

Patients will drink fluids containing nanorobots programmed to attack and reconstruct the molecular structure of cancer cells and viruses.

Scientist Robert Burrell created a process to manufacture antibacterial bandages using nanoparticles of silver. Silver ions block microbes’ cellular respiration. In other words, silver smothers harmful cells, killing them.

There will continue to be opportunities for the use of nanomaterials in drug delivery systems.