My university course has currently been focusing on nanochemistry and I think that this area is really fascinating. I have been researching nanotechnology online and have come across a few interesting stories but I will just summarise one.
When designing drugs, I'm sure that one of the most important factors is how you would get the drug into the bloodstream and where it needs to act specifically. If this hurdle is overcome then the drug will be more effective at low doses and would bring with it less side effects. Nanoparticals measure on the scale of one thousandth of a millimetre and hold hope in discovering the key to this problem since they are so small that they can slip into the cell in which the drug needs to act.
However, the problem arises not with the infiltrating into cells, but actually getting to the cells themselves. The body has, on average, eight pints of blood (four and a half litres) and in one minute nearly nine pints of blood is pumped around the body. At this rate, you can imagine that a tiny particle would find it hard to exit the main arteries when necessary if surrounded by this amount of blood powering through the body.
Giving some hope towards this method, it was found that the red blood cells pushed microspheres to the wall when their diameter was two or more microns (two thousandths of a millimetre). You may think, why not use microspheres then? But unfortunately microspheres are too large and fail as drug carriers. What next? Well, why not put nanospheres with microspheres and let them work together? This problem is still not overcome and scientists are working on other methods such as making nanoparticles of different shapes to see if this will increase their ability to escape from the hurrying red blood cells.
This problem really intrigues me and although there is not a solution yet I will be keeping a close eye on whether there are any developments in the future.
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