Blog @ NanoVic - Nanotechnology Blog

Who would have thought that design would be so important to nanotechnology?  They may seem like very different disciplines, but, they actually go together hand-in-hand.  The importance of design became very apparent to us when we participated in the Design Victoria business immersion pilot program earlier this year, in which we discovered that design can play a very important role in shaping the development of a new technology, and in time, can also lead to a consumer-driven product.  We worked with a Melbourne-based industrial design firm, Charlwood Design, to design a prototype of an inhalation device for the delivery of insulin, based on our Pulmonary Drug Delivery project.  The results were outstanding, and the final product was sleek, sexy and compatible with the technology.  The development of the Pulmonary Delivery device is now being showcased on the newly launched Design Victoria website, leading the way on technology and design!

A nano-scale tool that distinguishes soft cancerous cells from stiffer normal ones could save lives by making it easier to diagnose cancer.  Researchers at UCLA have used an atomic force microscope to show that the surface of living cancer cells were more than 70 per cent softer than their healthy counterparts.  This measureable difference in elasticity held true across lung, breast and pancreatic cancers, and could provide a powerful means of detecting malignant cells that might otherwise escape notice.  The study has been pulished in the British Journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The researchers removed body fluid from suspected cancer patients and used atomic force microscopes to apply minute amounts of pressure on individual cells.  It was discovered malignant cells were four times as soft as normal tissue across all three types of cancer examined.

It all sounds very exciting and anything that will assist with earlier detection can only be good.