Nanotechnology could improve how well and how quickly we diagnose disease and design treatments for individual patients, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL
PICTURE THIS – you walk into a local clinic, provide a drop of blood and within minutes you get an early diagnosis of a disease starting to brew deep within your body.
Or maybe the condition is more advanced – cue bright, minuscule particles that can latch on to and pinpoint individual ailing cells and possibly even provide clues about the best drug therapies to apply.
It’s not so far-fetched – nanotechnology research is set to bring such “point-of-care” and personalised diagnostic tests to patients in the not-too-distant future, according to experts who met in Dublin earlier this month.
At the nano level – which operates at dimensions of 100 nanometres (billionths of metres) or less – materials can change their properties, and nanotechnology aims to harness those changes with sensors to collect high quality information from patients.
The next decade will see nanotechnology having a great impact, says Harold Craighead, professor of engineering physics at Cornell University, who was at Dublin City University recently to attend a workshop on nano-enabled sensors and diagnostics.
His lab has developed a method of sorting single molecules of DNA so they can be faster identified and characterised. “DNA is a molecule of general interest, so it can be used for diagnosing diseases, for identifying a specific strain of pathogen as well as obtaining whole sequence information,” says Craighead, director of the nanobiotechnology centre at Cornell.
“It’s a target molecule that has broad uses, so we are developing technology that will get information at different levels from DNA.”
He has also developed tiny coated cantilevers that can detect the resonance of structures such as particular biochemicals or viruses. And their uses can extend even beyond medicine, he explains.
“We are working on moving that into detecting chemicals from air,” he says. “So we are making these resonators that work in air and you could coat an array of them in different things that are sensitive to different compounds and you have what some people call an electronic nose.
“If you had a cheap one, it could sit in your refrigerator and you could unofficially diagnose what is going on with the food.”
But back to the clinical applications: nanotechnology and nanoparticles can help find tiny concentrations of “biomarkers” of disease in the body and catch conditions at an early stage of development, explains Prof Brian MacCraith, director of the Biomedical Diagnostics Institute at DCU.
“It opens up whole new possibilities, and one of the key challenges is to detect as low a concentration as possible of a biomarker of cancer or cardiovascular disease for example,” he says. In practice, that could mean using high-brightness nanoparticles that emit light signals when they find their target in the body, or engineering nanoparticles as miniature sensors to relay information about conditions such as oxygen levels in cells.
The Dublin workshop brought together researchers from DCU, Cornell and the University of Ulster among others, and sought to identify areas where they could work together. Cancer emerged as one of those areas, says MacCraith.
“You can use nano to look at some of the fundamental mechanisms happening in the progression of cancer, and early diagnosis and targeted delivery to sites,” he says, noting that nanoparticles are sensitive enough to seek out even low levels of circulating cells thrown into the bloodstream by a tumour.
Finding those “needles in the haystack” could help diagnose cancer at an early stage and once those cells have been caught, their molecular signature could even give clinicians an insight into what exactly they are dealing with.
“The circulating tumour cells would be representative of the tumour itself, and that could narrow the range of treatment options,” says MacCraith.
Once a patient has been diagnosed, taking some of the tumour cells and putting them through their paces on a specially designed microfluidic chip could also help identify the best way forward, he adds.
“The concept is to have a large array of cancer cells from a patient on the chip and you can trial a range of [drug] regimens on the chip and view which has the biggest impact on the cells, which saves any empirical testing on the patient themselves.”
A project between DCU and the Coombe Hospital has been developing such a system for ovarian cancer cells, says MacCraith.
“It would be a near-patient personalised test and it could transform, in some cases, the approach one would adopt, but it would certainly lead to a much more rapid decision.”
He sees such developments making a clinical impact within about five years, and hopes the benefits will continue after that. But he also believes patients will see the benefits of the scientific developments here only if research groups work together and link with industrial partners.
“Nanomedicine covers targeted drug delivery, diagnostics, in vivo imaging and regenerative medicine. They are all areas where Ireland has research strengths and has relevance to strong industries that are already in the country,” says MacCraith.
“But it will only happen if there’s a co-ordinated approach – the whole will be much greater than the sum of its parts. And it’s a [talent] here that we can be agile and talk to each other.”
Harnessing nanotechnology for medical applications is a smart move for Ireland because it plays to our existing strengths, agrees Jack Gorman, a pharmaceutical and healthcare analyst with Davy Research.
“It makes perfect sense from a policy perspective to be focusing on an area such as nanotechnology because our own expertise and experience over the last 20-30 years are in the areas of medical devices, biotech and biologics, and these are the areas that are perfectly suited to this technology,” he says.