I spent yesterday at a meeting at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, Nanotechnology in Medicine and Biotechnology, which raised the question of what is the right size for new interventions in medicine. There’s an argument that, since the basic operations of cell biology take place on the nano-scale, that’s fundamentally the right scale for intervening in biology. On the other hand, given that many current medical interventions are very macroscopic, operating on the micro-scale may already offer compelling advantages.
A talk from Glasgow University’s Jon Cooper gave some nice examples illustrating this. His title was Integrating nanosensors with lab-on-a-chip for biological sensing in health technologies, and he began with some true nanotechnology. This involved a combination of fluid handling systems for very small volumes with nanostructured surfaces, with the aim of detecting single biomolecules. This depends on a remarkable effect known as surface enhanced Raman scattering. Raman scattering is a type of spectroscopy that can detect chemical groups with what is normally rather low sensitivity. But if one illuminates metals with very sharp asperities, this hugely magnifies the light field very close to the surface, increasing sensitivity by a factor of ten million or so. Systems based on this effect, using silver nanoparticles coated so that pathogens like anthrax will stick to them, are already in commercial use. But Cooper’s group uses, not free nano-particles, but very precisely structured nanosurfaces. Using electron beam lithography his group creates silver split-ring resonators – horseshoe shapes about 160 nm across. With a very small gap one can get field enhancements of a factor of one hundred billion, and it’s this that brings single molecule detection into prospect.
On a larger scale, Cooper described systems to probe the response of single cells – his example involved using a single heart cell (a cardiomyocyte) to screen responses to potential heart drugs. This involved a pico-litre scale microchamber adjacent to an array of micron size thermocouples, which allow one to monitor the metabolism of the cell as it responds to a drug candidate. His final example was on the millimeter scale, though its sensors incorporated nanotechnology at some level. This was a wireless device incorporating an electrochemical blood sensor – the idea was that one would swallow this to screen for early signs of bowel cancer. Here’s an example where, obviously, smaller would be better, but how small does one need to go?
Re: biothreats. I’d think finding biosensor industrial manufacturing advances to make them cheap, would be the way to go to highlight flu-like designer pathogens. Later, encapsulated nanoparticles would necessitate physically opening a non-communicable vector casing. If the particle is small enough to float, a partial vacuum would help to speed detection. With the advent of the mechanical bio/chem sensors comes some of the stronger nanotech predictions.