Nanotechnology platforms for cancer, and beyond

Hello, everybody. I am very pleased to have the opportunity to tell you about nanotechnology, several platforms that come from nanotechnology to address unmet needs in cancer. And as you will see, even though I'm going to be talking about them specifically in the context of cancer, and naturally a triple-negative breast cancer, in particularly a scary form of breast cancer. The type of platforms that I'm going to be presenting has applicability well beyond just the domain of oncology. I'm Mauro Ferrari and I previously served as president and CEO of the Houston Methodist Research Institute, and executive vice-president of our hospital system in Texas, as well as senior associate dean at our partner medical school, Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. I've been involved in nanotechnology for medicine probably as long as anyone, and I can tell you a few stories among the facts that I'm going to be presenting to you. I will also try to give you a few perspectives. Hopefully they can be of some use for your endeavors.

Nanotech by the second point got so big and exciting that Nature decided to launch a journalist specifically dedicated to nanotechnology. And of course, in the early days, saw various disciplines, so the question is always about the basic definition. What is nanotechnology? They asked a few people and I had the good fortune of being asked them. And here I'm presenting my biased definition of what nanotechnology is. First, of course, you have to have objects that are man made, that's what the technology is. That have components or the whole device at the nanoscale. But the third component that is very important in the definition, and this is pretty much a consensus perspective is that the properties that we observe in these devices or in these material on the nanoscale to be nanotechnological has to have properties that arise because of the nanoscopic dimension. In addition, and this is my biased opinion, I think that observing these emerging properties is important of being able to predict them. It gives you a greater degree of certainty about the connection between the nanoscale and the observable that comes out of that. They are trying to take advantage of. And that comes from the word mathematics. So the notion of predictive theories to me has a strong foot in within mathematics, and so I summarize this colloquially by saying, it ain't nano if you ain't got the math to back it up. But feel free to substitute for math any other approach they can give you prediction starting from the dimensional considerations that we are talking about. And here are the dimensions, everybody's got a different version of the same idea in looking along the x-axis and things you find in nature that they are dimensional scales, so they are started with the nanometer and then moving its way up. I will tell you the following observation using this slide, if you look at what biology does. Of course, all biology is based upon building blocks that down on the nanoscale could be nucleic acids, it can be proteins. Various biological molecules have the nanoscale size and they are the building blocks. You get to viruses in terms of complexity. All of these building blocks are wonderful machines that are fully functioning with their building components on the nanoscale. But then the next step up that biology takes is the notion of establishing life. Life doesn't belong in the nanoscale. The only way you get life is to move up on the microscale with components inside that are tightly coordinated and that are at the nanoscale. So between this dimension and this dimension is one order of magnitude, but the complexities of the merges is unbelievable. My biased opinion is that where we are with nanotechnology at this time, we have been able to make, we, the collective community worldwide, have been able to make things at the nanoscale, you see some examples here, that are great, that are very functional. They have a number of different capabilities. The big next step of the frontier is how do you integrate a bunch of nanos into micros, not necessarily to make life, I'm not certainly advocating that we should be thinking about making life synthetically, but I would say certainly to get a much greater complexity of function that you cannot obtain at the nanoscale.