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When we talk about nano, we talk about nanometers.
A nanometer is one billionth the length of a meter.
To get an idea of it, the size difference of a 1by1 nanometer cube and an eyeball,
- is the same as the size difference between an eyeball and the whole earth.
Anders is a Ph.D.-student and is working in the field of nano medicine and, more specifically, drug delivery.
It is important to realize, that things at the nanoscale behaves very differently from the things at our scale.
At our scale an important force is gravity, that keeps our feet on the ground,
but at the nanoscale, there are other forces that become more important,
For example, hydrogen bonding or electrostatic forces and here gravity doesn’t play an important part.
It requires some imagination to understand how things behave at the nanoscale,
- and even though I have been studying nanotechnology for quite some years right now,
- it it still very difficult for me to grasp these nanoscale sizes.
At iNANO at Aarhus university, there is a lot of interesting nano science going on.
It ranges from foods, medicine and materials.
I am working in the field of nano medicine and, more specifically, drug delivery.
When we get sick, it is often because a subset of our cells, either becomes infected or change in behavior.
This is for example true for the devastating disease cancer, where one of our own cells changes in behavior and can become malignant.
That means that it divides vigorously and produces tumors.
In treatment, the conventional chemotherapeutic drugs are often associated with unwanted side effects
- since they not only affect the cancer cells but also healthy cells.
In treatment it is common to use chemotherapeutic agents that kills the cancer cells, but also other cells in our body that divide.
That is for example seen for patients that loose their hair,
- but it is also associated with other and more serious side effects like pain, infections or an impaired immune system.
Targeted drug delivery describes a new medical concept in which a therapeutic compound
- is transported around the body to reach its target site, for example cancer cells, before taking action.
To realize this, it requires some sophisticated drug design.
A cancer tumor in the body will often have other molecules associated with it than the healthy cells.
And if we can identify these molecules we can hopefully produce and design new drug devices
- that can identify these molecules and thereby deliever the drug only to cells that are malignant.
And this would have many advantages over conventional chemotherapy.
A new way of using Nanotechnology in the drug design is inspired by the Japanese art -
- of folding paper – called origami – in this context DNA origami.
In 2009, people from iNano, builded a 3-dimensional DNA origami box structure.
To get an idea of the scale, the box is about 40 nanometers on each site, and that is still much smaller than the cancer cells.
The box will be designed with a controllable lid to be opened by molecules from the cancer cells
- when it reaches the diseased part of the body.
The building blocks we use to produce new drug delivery vehicles is DNA.
And this might come as a surprise since usually we know a DNA as the storage of genetic information
- which is found in all living organisms on this planet.
The fascinating things about this method is that these structures self-assemble
- so that you don’t have to show where each of the different strands should position,
- but they find their position just by themselves, because it is programmed into their sequence.
And the researchers showed that you can open the lit upon recognition of specific molecules,
- that are found in abundance in cancer cells.
This makes it possible to realize nanoscale devices that can identify sick from healthy cells,
- and only cure the sick cells in that specific part of body.
It is important to notice, that the box is not as big as the cancer cell on this picture.
On this scale the box will be too small to see and has therefore been enlarged.
DNA origami structures have an exceptional potential for being used as a drug delivery vehicle.
However, applications for DNA origami structures in therapy, is not something we will see in the near future.
Currently the structures are still very expensive to produce in amounts for therapeutic purposes
- and still a lot of challenges must be addressed.
Like all drugs it will have to be thoroughly tested for safety before it could be used.
It is our hope, that DNA nanotechnology can bring us one step closer to the realization of nano-devices
- that can perform complicated tasks inside our body with high specificity and high precision.