I'd like to start off by thanking the committee for inviting me here to talk about nanomedicine and nanotechnology.
I'd like to start off by describing that nanotechnology is essentially an enabling technology that allows you to do different types of applications. We see nanotechnologies in making faster computer chips and thinner screens, as well as in the treatment and diagnosis of diseases.
Right now Canada doesn't have a major focus in nanotechnology research and development, compared to a lot of different developed countries in the world. To give you an example, right now, 16% of all publications that come out of Singapore have some aspect of nanotechnology. South Korea, China, and all the countries in Asia are actually putting a lot of emphasis on this.
In terms of the application of nanotechnology to medicine, the big driver in that particular space is actually the U.S. They started a cancer nanotechnology program about 12 years ago, which has now spun off seven cancer nanotechnology centres, and continue to produce new types of companies and clinical trials for new types of drugs.
I thought I'd spend this 10 minutes talking about what nanotechnology is, and why it's important. I want to describe that because nano now has become an interesting buzzword. You see it in tons of movies, always relating to villains trying to change some structure or something to become more villainous, right? Nanotechnology is a very interesting and growing research field.
The first thing I want to define is what nanotechnology is. There are actually three or four definitions out there. The U.S. has one, Japan has one, and the U.K. has one. The one I like is the British Standards Institution's definition, which essentially refers to nanotechnology as the intentional design, synthesis, characterization, applications of structures, devices, and systems by controlling size and shape in the 1 to 100 nanometre range.
To give you a perspective of what that size range means, if you look at the diameter of your hair, that diameter is 1 to 10 micrometres. Nanotechnology is about 100 to 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of your hair. It's very important that we work with materials in this size range, and the real reason is that you can tune the properties of the material. In the traditional method, if you want to make a new material, you have to start off with a synthesis and you basically have to make a new compound each time you want to make something with a new property.
The unique thing about nano is that in order to make the material with a unique property, all you have to do is change the size or the shape of the material. Something that is very small versus large; they have very different properties, but the method of manufacturing is exactly the same. It allows you to have a lot of raw materials.
I'm showing here the real crux of nanotechnology, and this is what drove the U.S. to put about a billion dollars in this for various applications. A good example is gold. All of us have gold jewellery and it looks yellowish, right? But if you look at gold at the nano scale, it's not yellow, it's actually red. The colour is actually different tints of red as you start changing the size of the material.
If you have something that's very small—for example, one atom or three atoms—the colour of that material looks white, so you can't tell the difference. But if you have something that's very large, 19 atoms to 26 atoms for example, it looks red. You can't tell the difference. At the 1 to 100 nanometre size range, you can change the colour of your material by changing the size, so something that is 6 atoms might appear blue, something that is 12 atoms may appear green, something that is 19 atoms will appear red.
If you have your gold jewellery, if you make it bigger and bigger, it still looks yellow. But if you start shrinking to the nano scale, it looks red, more red, sometimes orange or green, depending on the size of the gold you're working with.
The unique aspect of nano is the tunability and creation of large amounts of raw materials for a variety of applications. As I mentioned, you can tune the optical properties of material, tune the magnetic properties of material, and tune the electrical properties of material. That's why nanotechnology is very commonly used to make better electronics, because these are all electronics-related.
I have an example of five different vials of what are called quantum dots. These are nano crystals made of cadmium and selenium. They were initially made in the 1970s by the former Soviet Union as a way to create more energy for bombs and for biowarfare, but what ended up happening is that all the new Christmas lights that you might buy at Walmart have quantum dots in them. The new LCD screens from Samsung now contain quantum dots because they give better resolution. This is what this is starting to move to.
These five vials are the exact same materials, cadmium and selenium. The only difference is that the green is three nanometres and the red is six nanometres; that is the only thing we've done. The reason that at that size you have tunability is that you force the electrons to behave in a certain way. That is the crux.
If you look at the gold particles shown on the right of this slide, they look like loose spherical particles under a microscope. It is basically a hard metal that you chip, so it looks like a small size.
The next picture shows what scientists can actually make of nanomaterials now. You can see that you can make little structures. These are called nano rice, a nano star, nano cubes. Whatever shape you can see with your eyes on the global scale, you can make in the nano scale now. It took 20 years to perfect strategies to make these particular materials. Because you make them in different shapes and sizes, you can now tune the physical properties of the material. Again, there are a lot of different raw materials.
In the last seven or eight years there has been a focus on nanotechnologies to solve some of the medical needs at this point. I'll give you some examples.
The way you can think about it is that nanotechnology is essentially an enabling tool to solve some of the issues associated with cancer therapeutics and diagnostics as well as to detect infectious disease. It's also starting to evolve into vaccine developments and is being used for cardiovascular detection. I'll explain how it's being used.
It has a broad range of applications. Many interesting researchers are trying to make what are called theranostic agents: can you make a nanostructure, inject it into the body, detect the disease, and as it detects the disease slowly release the drug to try to treat the disease? It is based on the ability to detect and sense the local environment in order to tell it what to release and how to treat the system. This is a new concept that's starting to come into play.
As I mentioned, the big push in nanomedicine from the U.S. government, in the late part of the 1990s and early 2000s, was to establish what is called the cancer nanotechnology program. What they believe is that with nanotechnology you can detect the cancer as it begins. It's the concept of early detection: the quicker you can detect a cancer, the greater the chance of survival. Once the cancer starts moving around your body, it's very difficult to find. You want to detect it before it starts moving around, because once it starts spreading, it's like finding a needle in a haystack. It is everywhere in your body, and even if you treat one cancer at one site, another site may start to spring and grow.
The other application that cancer nanotechnology focuses on is targeted therapy. You can actually design these structures to carry the drug so that it can specifically only go to the cancer site and not to a healthy site. One of the problems of chemotherapeutics is that you're flooding your body with poison and hoping that the poison will kill more of your disease cells than your healthy cells. That's why you have all the side affects associated with chemo. But if you can trap everything in a nanostructure, protect it, and cause it to only release at the disease site, you basically will remove the exposure of the healthy tissues.
The third part is to try to improve surgical precision. When you try to remove a tumour, if two cancer cells survive, they can grow again. In some work being done at Rice University, they can take particles that produce heat, target a tumour cell, and then basically shoot a laser right at that spot to try to burn off the tumour at that site.
But there are two challenges in getting this to work. One is the delivery challenge. How do you actually get to the site? What is the proper size and shape? At this size range, below 100 nm, the particles can travel within your body, but how do you control the delivery process? There is also the toxicity of these materials: some of these materials are made of metal, and that becomes an issue.
The second aspect is nanotechnology diagnostics and how to simplify the diagnostic process. Here is a slide illustrating a strategy in which we can take beads, load them with nanomaterials of different colours, and make bar codes out of them. We all go to the grocery store: the bar code scans the product, allowing the store to monitor inventory of that particular product. Can we do the same thing with diseases? We can enable these molecular-scale bar codes to scan for different kinds of genetics, scan for different kinds of proteins associated with diseases. This allows you to then detect the disease not just by using one protein or one gene, but maybe a series of proteins or a series of genes to tell you that you have some disease.
What is being worked on now is to convert this technology into a hand-held device so that you can actually use it at the point of care, so that when you're infected it's all automated. You can essentially push a button and within an hour can say whether you have disease A, B, or C. On my final slide, I use malaria as an example, in which there is one strain that is very deadly and one that is not.
Within the next few years, there is going to be a lot of emphasis on translation and diagnostic devices. In vitro hand-held devices are going to be commercialized in the next few years in terms of development and patient care. With regard to the in vivo application, there's going to be a lot more work required, but probably, in about the next 10 to 15 years, it will be in play in order to inject into the body and be able to detect diseases or treat diseases.
With that, I'd like to thank you. That's my overview of nanotechnology at this point.