Welcome to The Iranian Site of Biomedical NanoTechnology

Medical researchers have been terrified of just this scenario since human gene therapy experiments began a decade ago. Now that it's happened, their motivation to find safer alternatives for delivering genes to human cells has been redoubled. Enter nanotechnology.

The fabrication of objects and devices on the scale of nanometers has been making rapid progress in the physical sciences. But you wouldn't necessarily think of it in connection with medicine. Yet nanotechniques might offer a solution to current problems in gene therapy--and some remarkable advantages in treating stubborn diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

A small vanguard of medical explorers is exploiting the tools of nanotechnology to manipulate biomolecules that regulate life and death, illness and health. The key to these efforts is that researchers are learning how to tailor devices and materials on the scale of billionths of a meter, thereby acquiring the ability to engineer structures and machines no bigger than biomolecules such as DNA. They're finally playing on the size scale of biology itself. And that means they may be able to design tiny tools to safely and effectively fix the nanoscopic machinery of illness, just as a mechanic works on a car's engine using tools that are on the same scale as the engine. This may sound like science fiction--and until recently it was--but it's reaching the verge of possibility because teams of doctors and scientists are combining advances from biology and chemistry with the synthesis and fabrication tools from chemical engineering, even the microchip industry.