Thursday 15 May 2008

Nanoparticles to nanomedicine


It's one thing to make a drug that can treat a disease. It's quite another to get it to go where it needs to in the body to be effective. That's why researchers at UCD are working out how to get tiny nanoparticles safely into cells, and in doing so they are unveiling some big surprises.

Nanoscience, or the study of particles on the scale of millionths of millimetres, has become a hot topic in research over the last decade. Engineered nanoparticles now offer the potential to deliver drugs to combat conditions like cancer, viral infections and neurodegenerative disease, which can lurk in currently hard-to-reach places in the body. See Claire O'Connell's article @ http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2008/0515/1210770682370.html