Nanoscience in diagnostics: A short review

Abstract

Nanoscience is at the leading edge of the rapidly developing field of nanotechnology. Nanosciences and nanotechnology are transforming a wide array of products and services that have the potential to enhance the practice of medicine and improve public health. Several areas of medical care are already benefiting from the advantages that nanotechnology can offer. Applications of nanoscience are in biotechnology, medicine, pharmaceuticals, physics, material science and also electronics. Nanotechnology extends the limits of molecular diagnostics to the nanoscale. Nanotechnology on a chip is one more dimension of microfluidic/lab on a chip technology. We still suffer serious and complex illnesses like cancer, cardiovascular diseases, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes as well as different kinds of serious inflammatory or infectious diseases (e.g. HIV). It is of extreme importance to face these diseases with appropriate means. The interplay between nanoscience and biomedicine is the hallmark of current scientific research worldwide. The use of nanoscience may open new vistas of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of medical diagnosis and therapeutics, so called nanomedicine. An appealing example is the use of quantum dots as fluorescent labels. Despite recent progress in the treatment of cancer, the majority of cases are still diagnosed only after tumors metastasize, leaving the patient with a grim prognosis. Nanotechnology is in a unique position to transform cancer diagnostics and to produce a new generation of biosensors and medical imaging techniques with higher sensitivity and precision of recognition. Novel nanotechnologies can complement and augment existing genomic and proteomic techniques employed to analyze variations across different tumor types, thus offering the potential to distinguish between normal and malignant cells. This brief review tries to reiterate the most contemporary developments in the field of applied nanoscience, particularly in their relevance in diagnosis of various diseases and discuss their future prospects.