Marvel’s superhero Antman is actually a drug delivery vehicle in Nanomedicine

Imagine yourself in a marvel movie, where you are playing the role of Ant-man! YES, you got it right, the crazy concept of quantum physics including Pym particles.

Imagine yourself as ant-man who has the potential to shrink himself. Now, Imagine if we could provide the same suit to doctors, nurses and engineers which basically was provided to every super hero in marvel’s ENDGAME.

I am sure you have already pictured what Í am going to say now.. yes ! Imagine giving the same suit to doctors and nurses that would help them to get access to difficult areas of body and help them treat us and perform very very precise surgeries very easily.. Pretty cool right!

Nanotechnology is also set on the mission to provide the similar tools to help doctors gain access to difficult areas of body to treat patients by using Nanomedicine.

Hello everyone my name is Uzair Hashmi and I welcome you all  to everything about Nanomedicine where I will talk about latest research in Nanomedicine and how it is going to impact the future. In this first episode, we are going to talk about basics.

 So if you are a scientist, Doctor or even if your undergraduate or postgraduate student in science I can tell you its going to be a treat for all of you!

Today we are going to talk about some of the coolest concept of Cancer therapy in Nanomedicine the Sonodynamic Therapy but basics comes first: In Nanomedicine, always know that Ant-man (Drug Delivery) is always going to be the delivery guy who is specialized to duck the enemies, knows how to reach the exact location and deliver the package unharmed and full.

So Ant-man is going to be drug delivery vehicle.

The core of Nanomedicine is to design different versions of Ant man and being an aspiring nanomed scientist, I can tell you all they think about how to be more effective and add give more features to the Ant-man that are so unique and different that he can deliver drug to specific area without the possibility of losing it.

Lets now Talk about Sonodynamic Therapy.

Sonodynamic Therapy is comparatively a new approach which is used to treat tumors using Ultrasound. We all have seen ultrasound of one or more organs in our lifetime so it’s a common knowledge that US can be used for specific tissues. In this type of therapy the Ant-man delivers the bomb to the specific site which is tumor tissue and after the bomb is delivered, it waits for the signal of activation which is the Ultrasound waves of particular frequency. Upon its activation by Ultrasound, it to blow up the tumour or terrorist camp inside the body and increase the chances of survival of patients.

Researchers are dedicated to bring continuous innovations in this field. Today I am going to give you one example where researchers made an amazing type of Nanodots to make sonodynamic therapy more efficient. They are called sonosensitizers or in simple words these nanodots only activate themselves in response of ultrasound.

If you have seen or you are a fan of harry-potter movie, you know definitely know about cloak of invisibility. One of the popular strategy of nanomedicine scientists is to use this cloak of invisibility to hide the ant-man as he enters in the human body. This helps the ant-man or drug delivery vehicle to go in stealth mode from the immune system so it can easily deliver package. One way scientists do that is by Pegylation where a PEG Is used to somehow  protect the ant-man to be recognized by the immune system of the body.

Researchers at the institute of functional Nano and soft Materials have recently tried to treat breast cancer by creating Titanium oxide nanodots which were doped with Iron. After they reached to the target site of tumour, these nanodots were activated by ultrasound and they created Reactive oxygen species or ROS inside the tumour which triggered tumour killing.

This is one of countless experiments researchers are continuously conducting to give ant-man more premium features that would make it invincible against cancer and in this way nanomedicine is making the future of cancer therapy bright .

At the same time, researchers also are working on some challenging tasks. One among the list of many concern is to make an escape route for ant-man. i.e if the material can not be degraded by body there should also be a route by which it gets excreted by the body.

Nanomedicine is getting exciting day by day and the integration of Basic and applied sciences and teams of molecular biologists, pharmacists, biotechnologists with chemists and physisicts make the venture more exciting.

At this stage I guess you must be thinking either about planning the escape route for Ant-man or the delivery vehicle, or thinking about the bomb explosion within the tumour, or may be the types of package the ant-man can deliver or the routes ant-man can take to deliver the drug to specific site. If you are a radiologist or chemist , you must be thinking about the triggering mechanisms of electron- hole pairs which create ROS upon ultrasound application. Trust me these are  the topics I am so excited to discuss but I want to end here to excite your mind to think about it and I will see you in next column where we will dive deep into some of the exciting ventures to see what nanomedicine future holds for us.

This is Uzair Hashmi and I am signing off from Everything about Nanomedicine and I will see you soon in my next blog. Until then Keep thinking.