Conference On Nanotechnology's Potential Impact On Medicine

Main Category: Biology / Biochemistry
Also Included In: Public Health;  Conferences
Article Date: 28 Aug 2007 - 20:00 PDT

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The future of medicine may be small -- very, very, very small.

The future of medicine and medical research is likely to prominently feature nanobiotechnology -- new technology for biology and medicine that works at the nanoscale, creating and manipulating materials only billionths of a meter in size to do revolutionary new medical work at the cellular and sub-cellular level.

The North Carolina Biotechnology Center, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Carolinas Medical Center are hosting "Nanotechnology in Biology and Medicine," a one-day conference on nanotechnology's potential impact on medicine on November 5, 2007. A pre-conference tutorial and roundtable discussion to provide a background for general audiences is planned for the afternoon of November 4.

The venue for the conference is the Cannon Research Center auditorium at Carolinas Medical Center uptown. Invited experts from the major universities of the Carolinas as well as national and international speakers will provide state-of-the-art lectures on topics on nanotechnology as it relates to biology and medicine. Industry participants from Charlotte, the Research Triangle Park, and the Triad will also provide an entrepreneurial perspective.

The advent of a flood of world-changing technological advances from coming nanoscale science has been eagerly awaited since physicist Richard Feynman first described the concept of nanotechnology in 1959. However, practical applications have been slow to arrive.

"So far in nanotech the promise has been great, but the real products that have emerged are few," said Kenneth Gonsalves, distinguished professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, chair of the conference organizers. "But in medicine there really is, in fact, some current potential for important applications -- I think some people might be surprised at how close we are."

"The healthcare community has been heavily involved in this conference," Gonsalves noted. "Among the speakers we have an interesting mix of physicians, clinicians, entrepreneurs and academics."

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Invited speakers and topics at the one-day conference include:

* Steve Barry PhD, President, Alnis BioSciences -- Magnetic nanoparticles for the detection, characterization and treatment of cancer

* David Carroll PhD, Wake Forest University -- Photo-dynamic Therapeutics based on Carbon Nanotubes

* Joe DeSimone PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- Adapting Fabrication Processes from the Electronics Industry for use in Nanomedicine

* Piotr Grodzinski PhD, National Cancer Institute -- Cancer Nanotechnology: An Opportunity for a New Class of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Solutions

* Don Ingber MD PhD, Harvard University -- Biological Design Principles for the Nanotechnologist

* Vinod Labhateshwar PhD, Cleveland Clinic -- Translational Nanomedicine - Basic Mechanisms to Applications

* Kam Leong PhD, Duke University -- Nonviral Gene Transfer Mediated by DNA Nanoparticles

* Molly Stevens PhD, Imperial College London, UK -- Clinical applications of nanotechnology: examples in tissue regeneration and biosensing

* Sam Wickline MD PhD, Washington University -- Nanoemulsions for multimodal molecular imaging and targeted therapeutics

* Otto Zhou PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-founder and chairman of Xintek -- Nanotube-based x-ray for in vivo cancer imaging and radiotherapy

(For full speaker biographies and abstracts, see: http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Custom.aspx)

The conference is sponsored by the Carolinas Healthcare System, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, UNC Charlotte and the university's Charlotte Research Institute and Center for Biomedical Engineering Systems, as well as by Summa, Allan and Additon Patent Attorneys. For more information, see http://www.ncbiotech.org/nanotech/. For online registration, see http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Summary.aspx.

Source: James Hathaway
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

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