Extending Medical Nanotech
A couple weeks ago, Calvin Johnson wrote an interesting post on nanotechnology, discussing some of the proposals, current research, and ways to write about it in a more realistic manner. One application he didn’t touch on, however, was the current work being done in nanomedicine.
Most current medical nanotech takes the form of either microscopic drug vectors tuned to open for certain wavelengths of light, or particles designed to identify cancers by infiltrating cells or locking onto certain proteins. These particles are largely organic and often designed to mimic the actions of antibodies. All these methods are being touted as ways to combat not only cancer and infections, but have also been used to repair tissue damage following heart transplants.
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