Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
engineer various types of NMs to diagnose disease and health conditions; to
recognize pathogenic infections; to locate, attach, and penetrate target tissue
or structures or pathogens; and dispense the payload of drugs or biological
compound to the targeted regions of the body. This is the area now known as
nanopharmacology. This chapter discusses various NMs for nanopharmacol-
ogy and the issues that may become an outcome of the applications of NMs
in pharmaceuticals.
Chapter 8 is one of the most important chapters of this topic because it
focuses on the safety and toxicity of the various NMs. To date, various govern-
ments have become more aware of the possible benefits as well as the dangers
of exposure to NMs in various consumer products. This awareness has led to
various guidelines worldwide.
236-239
The need for proper characterization of
the various properties of the NMs has also been recognized as essential for the
evaluation of the possible effects on health and environmental safety. However,
limitations in the risk assessment of NMs are still preventing proper evalua-
tions, and probably, also the possible adoption of strict regulations. The lack of
high quality exposure and dose-related data for humans and the environment
is one of the major drawbacks in adopting regulations for use and applications
of NMs. There is also the difficulty in how to quantify the presence of NMs
reproducibly on a routine basis in various substrates, which is due to the lack
of reliable and standardized measurement techniques. These difficulties must
first be overcome before regulations for screening/monitoring of nanoscale
particles in sensitive work areas can be implemented. The biggest challenges
lie in the measurement of NMs in the air, water, and land. This consequently
holds as well for food and food products that come from water and land. Cur-
rently, the information on the presence of NMs relies on information provided
by manufacturers. The detection of NMs in consumer products suffers from
the difficulty in discriminating between background signals and added NMs.
This is also complicated by the coating proteins and other biomolecules on
NMs exposed to biological matrices. In addition, exposure estimation is also
hampered by lack of information on product use and use of multiple prod-
ucts containing NMs. Better instrumentation, toxicological techniques suited to
NMs, and regulation standards are necessary to pre-empt possible short-term or
long-term harmful effects if there are any.
1.3 HISTORICAL AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVE
The beginning of the concept of nanotechnology without the word itself was
in a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society
meeting at Caltech on 29 December 1959.
240-243
In this talk entitled “There's
Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, Feynman focused on a process which involved
the ability to manipulate down to the individual atoms and molecules using a set
of precise tools to build and operate another proportionally smaller set, and so
on down to the smallest needed scale.
242
