Nanomedicine and bio-nanotechnology

Introduction

Nanomedicine and bio-nanotechnology seek to exploit a timely convergence of two parallel recent developments toward the diagnosis and therapy of disease - the decoding of the human genome that has led to greater understanding of the molecular basis of diseases, and nanotechology, which offers the means to control single molecular interactions.

Nanomedicine

The Nanomedicine Consortium was formed to establish nanomedicine as a new paradigm for diagnosis and therapy of cancer, infectious and cardiovascular diseases from bench to bedside. Based at Northeastern University, the Consortium includes outstanding medical institutions such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel and Deaconness Medical Center and Dana Farber Cancer Center, and industrial organizations including Genzyme, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, and Boston Scientific. The tightly-integrated interdisciplinary team of medical researchers, pharmaceutical scientists, physicists, chemists, and chemical engineers, has an extensive range of expertise to facilitate research on nanomedicine:

• Development of nanomedical technologies using polymeric nanoparticles, lipid nanoparticles, metal nanoparticles, and self-assembling nanosystems,
• Synthetic chemistry required to design and optimize new strategies for nanoparticle preparation and functionalization,
• Science and technologies for cancer diag-nostic and imaging techniques using nano-particles as reporter platforms and contrast enhancing agents,
• Therapeutic targeted and intra-cellular drug and gene delivery using nanocarriers,
• Preparation of nanoparticles susceptible to external factors, such as electromagnetic fields from radio-frequency to infrared radiation, and hyper/hypothermia, that they can transfer to surrounding cells and tissues (tumor),
• Theoretical modeling of nanoparticle processes in biological and medical environments, and of drug and gene delivery,
• Clinical diagnosis and therapy of prostate, breast, and liver cancer.

Bio-Nanotechnology

A multidisciplinary team from Northeastern University, Rutgers University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Shriners Hospital for Children and the University of Connecticut is studying the development of  protein-based nano-motors and nano-robots. The research team includes experts from robotics, design and mechanical engineering; chemical and biochemical engineering; biomedical engineering; chemistry and materials science; and physics and molecular dynamics. The long term goal is the development of novel and revolutionary biomolecular machine components that can be assembled and form multi-degree-of-freedom nanodevices that will apply forces and manipulate objects in the nanoworld, transfer information from the nano to the macro world, and travel in the nanoenvironment. These machines are expected to be highly efficient, controllable, economical in mass production, and fully operational with minimal supervision. These ultra-miniature robotic systems and nano-mechanical devices will be the biomolecular electro-mechanical hardware of future biomedical applications. This project aims to:

• Identify proteins that can be used as motors in nano / micro machines and mechanisms, with a focus on the mechanical properties of viral proteins that open or close depending on the pH level of the environment. From various viral proteins, a new, powerful, linear biomolecular actuator type, called the Viral Protein Linear (VPL) motor, will be produced.
• Develop dynamic models and realistic simulations / animations to accurately predict the performance of the proposed VPL motors.
• Perform a series of biomolecular experiments to demonstrate the validity of the proposed concept of VPL motors.
• Study the interface of the proposed protein motors with other biomolecular components such as DNA joints and carbon-nanotube rigid links so that complex, multi-degree of freedom machines and robots powered by the VPL motors are formed.