Dean Ho | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

Engineering novel diagnostic modalities and implantable cytomimetic nanomaterials for next-generation medicine.

The advent of 21st century medicine will be based on a comprehensive approach to achieving the highly sensitive and specific detection of diseases, as well as the development of novel materials and devices based on biotic-abiotic interfacing as interventional modalities. Novel technologies that enable early identification of physiological changes will serve as a gateway tool for the proper treatment of these disorders. Toward the realization of these technologies, microfabrication and nanofabrication methods have been applied to biomedical systems that allow scientists to interact with cellular and molecular systems on their native size scales. Future enabling systems will build on the foundation composed of such devices. With respect to the envisioned fruition of biofunctional nanomaterials and systems, foundational studies of biological systems and molecules, as well as their interfacing with biocompatible materials, have produced a domain of components that can be integrated and engineered toward eventual cytomimetic materials for transplantation. In addition, the potential underscoring of their future applications in nanoscale medicine is based on the ability to engineer and design intelligent membrane/protein self-assembling and organization phenomena that are typically found in nature into these artificial composite systems. These devices will provide a powerful suite of solutions with broad applicabilities in nanomedicine, for example, (1) the use of concomitant protein functionality toward energy production and the powering of medical implants and (2) replacement of damaged cells (e.g., heart and neuron) with implantable biologically intelligent engineered materials. This work will examine key advances in the areas of diagnostics and synthetic biology that have led to visionary contributions to next-generation medicine. Furthermore, we present 2 devices that will contribute to the realization of compelling biosensing and biofunctional material technologies. These systems include advanced diagnostic platforms for whole-cell detection, as well as copolymeric materials that have been functionalized by the coupled activity of their embedded membrane proteins. They are envisioned to successfully bridge the gap between foundational scientific progress and the realization of rapid point-of-care disease assessment and biofunctional devices with higher-order behavior.

Biocompatible Materials↗

PubMed2006

Nanomanufacturing and characterization modalities for bio-nano-informatics systems.

In the next decade or two, the feature size of microelectronic devices will continue to decrease and is eventually expected to reach fabrication and material limits. With the field of microelectronics rapidly approaching the end of its roadmap, the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) was created for the purpose of creating new technologies and to maintain the momentum of continuous scientific and technological progress. Primarily, the fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology aim to synthesize, characterize, apply, and control macro functional molecules and consist of three areas. First, the area of bio-nanotechnologies concerns that of biological molecules such as DNA, the molecule that serves as the blueprint of all living organisms. Harnessing the intrinsic functionality of these nano-sized biological molecules, i.e., DNA/RNA and proteins, will yield enormous potential for a wide array of applications (biomedical, energy, sensing, etc.) Second, diminishing electronic device feature sizes has spurred the development of new techniques for nanoelectronics and has emerged as a critical area of research. Third, these macro functional molecules possess rich potential for various new nanomaterials that have applications in bio-nano and nanoelectronics industries. Given the range of devices and applications that may be generated and addressed, respectively, through the fruition of these areas, development of novel and advanced core characterization and nanomanufacturing technologies will serve as a requisite strategy toward the realization of the potential underlying nanotechnological development. As such, this review will address how these novel technologies will be used to achieve a true coalescence of nanoscience and nanotechnology. This, in turn, will ultimately benefit the human condition by using the building blocks and fundamental findings of nanoscience to develop systems based on the fusion of biology, nanotechnology, and informatics, with embedded intelligence and emergent behavior.

Computational Biology↗