The Nanotech BC Blog: The Young Turks of AMPEL

Progress in science in technology is driven by many things -- money, infrastructure, as well as popular and political support, but the arguably the most important factor in innovation is people.

Recently Nanotech BC has had the opportunity to work with some of the members of the University of British Columbia's MiNa -- Micro-systems and Nanotechnology, group. They are a research group of scientists working on projects applying micro and nanotechnology to everything from bio-medical devices to energy to fabrication.

BC deserves credit for the huge investment it has made in nanotechnology researcher, but it's even more important to keep our eyes on the people behind the machines and MiNa is one of the teams that is making nanotechnology a reality.

The Nanotech BC Blog: Everyday I Write the Book

I keep stumbling upon great nanotech blogs:

Nanotechnology Development Blog -- articulate and wide ranging. I've only read the first four or five posts, but they seem to have a nice balance between research and business. It's definitely on my daily reading list from now on.

Blog-Nano: Nanoscale Materials and Nanotechnology -- I hadn't even gotten through the Weekly Round-up post before I linked to it. In particular I'm grateful for the link to SFU's grand achievement in fine-print: the Worlds Smallest Book. Here's a picture, but make sure you have your glasses (or a scanning electron microscope) handy.

Finally, I can't finish the week without linking to something a bit more mind expanding. Nanowerk has a great article about nanotechnology and neural interfaces. Nanotech is starting to blur the line between human and machine, raising questions that we need to start considering.

The Nanotech BC Blog: Who Needs Nanobots?

Christine Peterson at Nanodot makes a good point about unrealistic expectations in nanotechnology by bringing up a 2000 prediction that full clinical application of "fleets of microscopic robots" would be underway by 2003.

The funny thing about predictions is that though they're often wrong about means, they can sometimes be surprisingly accurate about ends. The purpose of fleets of circulatory robots is the medical treatment of cancer, heart disease and other serious illnesses. The lack of advanced nanorobotics isn't stopping researchers from using nanotech to attack those diseases in different ways.

PhysOrg.com has an article on how attaching polymeric nanoparticles to red blood cells turns the body's own blood into an ideal delivery system for medicine. This is a brilliant example of how synergising with the body's natural systems can allow us to elegantly do things that we're not yet capable of any other way.

There's nothing wrong with working towards a vision of nanorobotics, but it's important to be able to appreciate the danger of getting fixated on a hypothetical "ideal" technology and missing simpler and sometimes better solutions.

The Nanotech BC Blog: Very Tiny Needles

What can't carbon nanotubes do? Now scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have been able to use them to inject quantum dots into living cells.

With a diameter of just one nanometer, you're not likely to see a carbon nanotube injector at your local clinic anytime soon, but they do seem poised to play a key role in cell biology research and gene delivery. Yet another example of nanotech as enabling technology paving the way for further advances to come.

The Nanotech BC Blog: Old Medicine, New Technology

Herbs play an important roll in folk medicine and one of the most important of them is turmeric. That bright yellow spice, in addition to providing taste and color to curry, is used to treat infection, arthritis, fever and many other illnesses.

Now curcumin, the substance that gives turmeric its color, is being combined with medical nanotechnology to fight cancer, Alzheimer's, and maybe more. Technology Review has an article on nanotech delivery systems that take molecular-scale doses of curcumin to tumors .

Medicine is one of the key places where nanotechnology can make a difference. On June 7th, Dr. Ellen Wasan of the BC Cancer Research Center spoke at the Nanotech BC Networking Session at BCIT. She presented on work she has been doing developing nanopharmacuticles that can take advantage of tumor physiology to deliver medicine directly to cancer cells. Dr. Wasan is using nanotechnology to solve toxicity, solubility and elimination problems.

Nanotech work is happening all over the world, yielding a wide variety of approaches to many devastating problems. This diversity comes from that fact that nanotechnology is no one set thing -- it's a broad enabling technology that gives researchers everywhere powerful new tools.

The Nanotech BC Blog: Sweet Power and the Taste of Success

Pacemakers, cochlear implants, neurostimulators, drug delivery systems -- implanted medical devices are crucial to the lives of tens of thousands of people. All of those systems need electricity which means bulky batteries containing toxic chemicals and dangerous, expensive surgery to extract and replace them. But perhaps not for much longer.

Sweet Power, a BC medical technology company based on Vancouver Island is developing an implantable fuel cell capable of generating electricity using blood sugar. Sweet Power's glucose fuel cell is a great example of MEMS (microelectronic systems) and how as devices get smaller, their power and usefulness keep increasing.

Sweet Power was recently recognized for their achievements at the 2007 Nanotech Ventures Awards in the Health and Medical Category. The significance of what Sweet Power is doing goes beyond their own technical achievements. By developing a way to make implantable devices cleaner, safer and smaller, Sweet Power is enabling the next generation of technology to save lives.