New Drugs

Many potentially useful drugs are never developed because they have side-effects or are too difficult to manufacture in a form that can be easily given to a patient. Nanotechnology can offer solutions to these problems by combining the “active ingredient” of the drug with stabilising molecules or by new processing technologies to produce the drug as a much finer powder.

For example, companies such as Nanotherapeutics now manufacture asthma drugs and painkillers as nanoscale powders which are taken using an inhaler and are more quickly absorbed into the body than traditional methods. VivaGel is a an anti-HIV drug based on nanoscale particles called dendrimers. The drug in action is pictured left, the dendrimer (in blue) coats cells and prevents the HIV virus entering.
Finally, new cancer treatments are being developed by MagForce Nanotechnologies. These are based on magnetic iron nanoparticles which can be made to heat up by altering an applied magnetic field, causing cancer cells, which are more temperature-sensitive than normal cells, to die.