0:00
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.
1:05
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.
