Nanotechnology is here!

I was joined on the podcast this week by Sonia Contrera, a physicist and pioneer in the field of nanotechnology, to discuss how the convergence of scientific fields is (literally) reshaping our understanding of who we are and what we’re made of. Below is an excerpt from our conversation.

?? I write about new technologies and their impact on the society in my weekly wondermissive, Exponential View.

How do you think about the way the field of nanotechnology is developing? Do you have any favourite examples of how the field is progressing?

Sonia Contera: "From the 1980s forward, people started to think about learning biology by making. So instead of using the tools of nanotech for just investigating how biology works, some people started to use biology to build things, for example using DNA as building blocks for structures. This started as a theoretical field but we're starting to see drugs being developed based on this idea. For example there was a recent paper in which you could build a little structure in the shape of a star with DNA and then you would get this star to bind viruses and they will bind them really strongly. This can be used for detecting viruses, analyzing what type of viruses you're actually detecting when you're doing a test.

But perhaps for me, the most interesting part of this has been the arrival of protein nanotechnology. So for a long time, one of the biggest problems of biology was to predict the structure of a protein without a very complex experiment. And once they produced computer programs capable of doing that, they immediately thought, "Okay, now we can create proteins that don't exist in nature." So now it's possible, in some cases, to go to your computer, design a protein, then go back to a cell, a bacteria or yeast, and get the cells to produce building materials or just proteins that can be used as drugs or vaccines or as building materials of electronic devices of the future."

Our full discussion is here.

One of the uses of nanotechnology is in the field of tissue engineering, which is to get human tissues artificiallycreated by bacteria. Is that a process that's being used in medicine today?

Sonia Contera: "Yes. For a long time we had a big problem of tissue rejection, but what is becoming possible is to remove a tissue from a donor, remove the cells, the original cells of the donor, and then you end up with a perfect scaffold made of collagen and other molecules. And then you seed in there the cells of the patient and then you culture them and then the cells of the patient start to grow that structure and then it's transplanted back into the patient. You don't have rejection and eventually the cells of the patient are able to reproduce the collagen of the original structure and you produce a perfect match. Currently, this can be used in cases where you have a damage that has been produced by a genetic disease or by a tumor, for example, in the trachea: you could remove the trachea and implant a tissue engineered trachea that can come usually from building your own cells into the scaffold of a donor."

Listen to our full discussion about the future of medicine and nanotechnology here.