BME 695L Lecture 2: Designing Nanomedical Systems

What this episode covers

See references below for related reading.2.1       Elements of good engineering design2.1.1    Whenever possible, use a general design that has already been tested2.1.2    Whenever possible, take advantage of “biomimicry” – Nature has tried many designs!2.1.3    Avoid “general purpose” design. Use multiple specific molecules to do specific tasks.2.1.4    Control the order of molecular assembly to control the order of events2.1.5    Therefore, perform the nano assembly in reverse order to the desired order of events2.2      Building a nanodevice2.2.1    Choice of core materials2.2.2    Add drug or therapeutic gene2.2.3    Add molecular biosensors to control drug/gene delivery2.2.4    Add intracellular targeting molecules2.2.5    Result is multi-component, multi-functional nanomedical device2.2.6    For use, design to de-layer, one layer at a time2.2.7    The multi-step drug/gene delivery process in nanomedical systems2.3      The challenge of drug/gene dosing to single cells2.3.1    Precise targeting of drug delivery system while protecting non-targeted cells from exposure to the drug2.3.2    How to minimize mis-targeting2.3.3    How to deliver the right dose per cell2.3.4    One possible solution – in situ manufacture of therapeutic genes2.4      Bridging the gap between diagnostics and therapeutics2.4.1    how conventional medicine is practiced in terms of diagnostics and therapeutics2.4.2    the consequences of separating diagnostics and therapeutics2.4.3    a new approach – "theragnostics" (or "theranostics")2.5      Examples of current theragnostic systems2.5.1    example 1: Rituxan ("Rituximab)(an example of not using diagnostics to guide the therapy)2.5.2    example 2: Herceptin ("terastuzumab")2.5.3    example 3: Iressa ("Gefitinib)2.5.4    other examples2.6      How theragnostics relates to Molecular Imaging2.6.1    conventional imaging is not very specific2.6.2    types of In-vivo Imaging         2.6.2.1 X-rays, CAT (Computed Axial Tomography) scans         2.6.2.2 MRI (magnetic Resonance Imaging)         2.6.2.3PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans2.6.3    "molecular imaging" of nanoparticles in-vivo for diagnostics/monitoring of therapeutics2.8      Engineering nanomedical systems for simultaneous molecular imaging2.8.1    using nanomedical cores for MRI contrast agents2.8.2    difficulties in using PET probes for nanomedical devices2.8.3    using cell-specific probes for molecular imaging of nanomedical devices2.8.4    breaking the "diffraction limit" – new nano-level imaging modalities2.9      Theragnostic nanomedical devices2.9.1    using nanomedical devices to guide separate therapeutic device2.9.2    when might we want to combine diagnostics and therapeutics?

PodParley-generated summary based on available episode metadata and transcript content.