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TOM WEBSTER: Hi.
My name is Tom Webster,
and I am Department Chair
and a full Professor
in the Department
of Chemical Engineering at
Northeastern University in Boston.
I also happen to serve as the
President-elect for the Society
for Biomaterials in
the United States.
And I'm also Director
of an Indo-US Center
for Biomaterials for Healthcare.
So I'd like to give you a
presentation right now on nano
medicine, and concentrate
on some of the promises
that we see in this field as
well as some of the pitfalls
that we have to be cautious about
for this field to move forward,
to continue to help human health.
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So on the first slide, we really
see where I'd like to begin,
and that is a definition
of nanomedicine.
And I think that this is important
because the field is still
relatively new.
So it's important for me at the
onset to describe what I mean when
I'm talking about nanotechnology,
and what I mean when
I'm talking about nanomedicine.
The way I think about nanotechnology
is pretty straightforward,
and it encompasses
two fundamental ideas.
The first idea is certainly you
have to be working with the material
at the nano scale.
Now, we could probably spend
the next week or even longer
arguing what dimension
nano scale is.
But rather than get
into that discussion,
I'd like to point out
the second promising part
of nanomedicine, the second part
to the definition of nanomedicine
and nanotechnology, and that is
that you have to be demonstrating
that your nano-material is
doing something significantly
different than what we have today.
So as just a quick example of
these two fundamental parts
to the definition, using
something with nano scale,
and then showing that it is
significantly different compared
to what we're using today,
we could think of particles,
we could think of
tubes, we can think
coating thicknesses,
that really describe what
is unique about the nano scale.
And of course, whenever you're
using nanotechnology in medicine,
we call that nanomedicine.
So, as I'll describe in this talk,
you can see nanomedicine almost
everywhere in human health today.
You can see examples of research
in diagnosing a disease,
in preventing a disease, as
well as treating a disease.
Primarily during this talk,
I will discuss how you can
treat diseases with nanomedicine.
But certainly, it is
a wide, broad field
that is attracting
a lot of attention
in the field of
scientists and clinicians.
