A
guide to the latest in nanoscience and technology research from
the team that brings you Materials Today.
August 2005
Cover story
Theorists at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory
have performed the first ab initio calculations of
the microscopic dielectric function in quantum dots and confirmed
that it is, in fact, almost the same as when the material is
in bulk form. The reduction in the dielectric constant (the
average dielectric function throughout the quantum dot) as quantum
dot size is reduced is, therefore, just a surface effect.
Anticipation
is rising that nanotechnology will bring great advances
in treating disease. Yet few can agree on even the definition
of nanomedicine. In fact, nanosized hybrid therapeutics
are not new but have been developing for many years, says
Ruth Duncan
Tarek
Fahmy and colleagues at Yale University focus
on targeted drug delivery using nanoparticles to couple
a targeting ligand to a nanosized, drug-loaded vehicle.
This way it is possible to achieve increasd efficacy of
a drug at a specific site of interest in the body.
Functionalized nanoparticles offer a
number of advantages as drug delivery systems. Gloria
J. Kim and Shuming Nie of Emory
University and Georgia Institute of Technology review
their use in treating cancers.
Patrick J. Ginty
and colleagues at the University of Nottingham, UK describe
how supercritical fluids can be used to improve the
field of drug delivery.
Richard Jones
acknowledges the contributions made by Eric Drexler in
drawing attention to the power of bionanotechnology. However,
the lesson is not that we will improve on biotechnology,
but that we can do nanotechnology better by using biotechnology
principles.
