WEEK 8 DISCUSSION BOARD RESPOND TO BOTH

NANOMEDICINE Nanomedicine is defined as the medical application of nanotechnology. Nanomedicine can include a wide range of applications, including biosensors, tissue engineering, diagnostic devices, and many others. According to the Center for Nanomedicine at Johns Hopkins, they focus on harnessing nanotechnology to diagnose, treat, and prevent various diseases more effectively. Our entire bodies are exposed to the medicines that we take, which can lead to unpleasant side effects and minimize the amount of medicine that reaches the places where it is needed. Medications can be more efficiently delivered to the site of action using nanotechnology, resulting in improved outcomes with less medication (John Hopkins Medicine, 2020).

For example, treating cancer with current chemotherapy delivery techniques is like spraying an entire rose garden with poison to kill a single weed. It would be far more effective to spray a small amount of poison, directly on the weed, and save the roses. In this analogy, a cancer patient’s hair follicles, immune cells, and epithelia are the roses being poisoned by chemotherapy. Using nanotechnology, we can direct the chemotherapy to the tumor and minimize exposure to the rest of the body. In addition, nanotechnologies are more capable of bypassing internal barriers further improving upon conventional nanotechnologies. Not only is the approach more effective at eradicating tumors, but it also results in a much higher quality of life for the patient (John Hopkins Medicine, 2020).

Nanotechnology can also reduce the frequency with which patients have to take their medications. Typically, the human body can very

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quickly and effectively remove medications, reducing the duration of action. For example, the current treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) requires monthly injections into the eye in a clinical setting. However, if the medication is slowly released from the inside of a nanoparticle, the frequency of injection can be reduced to once every 6 months. The nanoparticle itself also slowly biodegrades into components that naturally occur in the body, which are also removed from the body after the medication has done its job. This exciting technology is currently being commercialized and moved toward clinical trials (John Hopkins Medicine, 2020).

Reference

John Hopkins Medicine. (2020). What is Nanomedicine? : Center for Nanomedicine. Retrieved from https://cnm-hopkins.org/what-is- nanomedicine/

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