Nanomaterials used in biomedicine and biopharmacy

Nanotechnology is a multidisciplinary area that brings the great scientific achievements of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and materials science to their application, to build with atoms and molecules, nanoscale materials with artificial intelligence, biocompatible structures, unconventional energy sources, nanorobots for medicine, chips with high component density and self-replicating biomaterials.

Nanomaterials represent a branch of nanotechnology that studies materials with “morphological features” in the 1-100 nm area, especially materials whose properties are influenced by reduced dimensionality (quantum confinement, high surface-to-volume ratio).

There are three categories of nanomaterials:

• fullerenes and other forms of nanocarbon
• inorganic materials (metals, semiconductors, insulators)
• organic materials and biomaterials

The first substances known to have drug-releasing abilities were polymers that originally had non-biological uses but were also selected in medicine due to their many desirable properties.

Soluble derivatives of fullerenes such as C60 (a football-shaped arrangement of 60 carbon atoms per molecule) show great promise as pharmaceutical agents.

Bacterial “biorobots” can be built, for example, from about 300 well-conserved genes, which constitutes the minimal genome for a functional microtubule. Used in medicine, these microtubules could be engineered to selectively produce vitamins, hormones, enzymes, and cytokines in the deficient body, or to selectively absorb and metabolize into harmless end products, harmful substances, poisons, toxins, or indigestible intracellular detritus.

An example of a nanorobot is the mechanical artificial red cell (erythrocyte) or “respirocyte” with numerous applications: substitutes in transfusions, treatment in anemia, lung dysfunction, perinatal and neonatal, therapy and diagnosis in cancer, prevention of asphyxiation, artificial respiration.

The major trend in future developments of nanomaterials is to make them multifunctional and controllable to external or local environmental signals, thus transforming them into nanodevices.