The world is shrinking.

Telephones are carried in pockets or purses and thousands of songs can be squeezed onto an MP3 player the size of a deck of cards. For the most part, these technologies provide the same tools as before, just in more convenient packages.

This is not news.

But there are areas where miniaturization still holds revolutionary potential; bionanotechnology is one of them. The medical application of nanotechnology promises to change the very nature of healthcare, largely through the creation of early diagnostic and detection systems that will alert doctors when potential dangers are found.

The source of this potential lies in the unimaginably small scale in which nanotechnology operates.

Nanodevices typically range in size from just a few to several dozen nanometers, a nanometer being one-billionth of a meter. By operating at that size, biomedical nanodevices can alert people to the presence of disease on the molecular level, when it first appears in the human body. This can be long before a patient begins to show any symptoms of a disease and long before it can develop into a significant problem.

By addressing health concerns at this stage of development, nanotechnology provides patients with one of the biggest advantages in medicine: time. The sooner a disease is discovered and diagnosed, the sooner it can be eliminated.

Since nanotechnology is an emerging field of science, many of its principals and possibilities are still being discovered, and the earliest efforts on the bionano front revolve around disease detection and diagnosis.

Researchers at the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering are working on several bionanotechnology projects that will have major impacts on the areas of clinical diagnoses and biosafety. Such projects include the development of an extremely small chip that can be implanted under a patient’s skin that will alert doctors to the presence of any one of hundreds of thousands of diseases long before the first symptoms appear; a nearly foolproof tool that can remotely detect the presence of toxic gases or bioterrorism agents such as anthrax; and tests for cancer and other diseases that produce results in a matter of hours, not days.

While these technologies are not direct cures, the speed and accuracy with which they detect disease is astonishing. And until actual cures are found, scientists will continue to work diligently toward the fastest, most accurate means of detection, providing people the chance to live longer, healthier lives.

More articles:
• Biodetection: Making Life Better One Molecule at a Time
• Crystal Clear Diagnosis: UH Researchers Use Lasers and Nanocrystals to Detect Diseases
• Tiny Tools Cover Lots of Ground: UH-Developed Nanodevices Search for Thousands of Diseases