Getting Straight to the Site of Disease
In today’s finest medical pavilions, where therapies are touted as cutting edge, the treatment of breast cancer still involves going under the knife. With luck, the tumor can be cut out without sacrificing the whole breast. For the unlucky, a lot of tissue must be removed in order to get rid of the malignant cells.
As advanced as modern medicine is, it’s often not possible to get at a diseased area without affecting the entire body. Surgery and radiation kill good cells along with bad, and chemotherapy and antibiotics infiltrate the whole body, producing unwanted side effects on normal organs. Even when we want to direct a drug to influence one part of the body, modern medicine still can’t transport a drug precisely to the diseased area or make sure that the drug releases its dose exactly where we want it to. For this reason, treatments today are still blunt weapons.
The promise of nanomedicine is to completely revolutionize treatment by transporting the medicine directly to the diseased site without compromising the rest of the body. The key in nanomedicine is the transport feature,
