BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS VI: CARBON NANOTUBES AS BIOSENSING AND BIO-INTERFACIAL MATERIALS - Carbon Nanotubes: From Bench Chemistry to Promising Biomedical Applications - page 181

Chapter 7
BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS VI: CARBON
NANOTUBES AS BIOSENSING AND BIO
INTERFACIAL MATERIALS
Yupeng Ren
Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
[e-mail]
7.1 INTRODUCTION
Since their discovery, 1 carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were widely studied for their
application as materials for bio-engineering, which include two promising
areas: biosensing and tissue engineering. 2 More and more research work
showed that CNTs are novel materials with advanced properties.
First of all, the special structure of CNTs can be looked on as wrapped
graphite layers. CNTs' electronic properties are dependent on the way
of the wrapping. CNTs could be divided into two groups: metallic CNTs
and semiconducting CNTs. Both of them have demonstrated potential for
application in development of nano-electric devices. Moreover, CNTs possess
advanced physical, chemical and biological properties, which make them
possible candidates for tissue engineering.
This chapter focuses on the forefront research of utilising CNTs to
produce medical and biological tools, including biosensing devices and tissue
engineering materials. The feasibility of design of CNT-based biosensing
devices, such as nano-transistors or nano-capacitors, is mainly due to the
electric properties of CNTs. On the other hand, CNT-based materials for
tissue engineering takes advantage of CNTs' physical, chemical and biological
characteristics. Those novel materials include bone growth scaffold, neural
cell grow matrix and so forth.