Practicing medicine at the nanoscale
With the recent launch of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, MIT News examines research with the potential to reshape medicine and health care through new scientific knowledge, novel treatments and products, better management of medical data, and improvements in health-care delivery. Modern medicine is largely based on treating patients with “small-molecule” drugs, which include pain relievers like aspirin and antibiotics such as penicillin.Those drugs have prolonged the human lifespan and made many life-threatening ailments easily treatable, but scientists believe the new approach of nanoscale drug delivery can offer even more progress. Delivering RNA or DNA to specific cells offers the promise of selectively turning genes on or off, while nanoscale devices that can be injected or implanted in the body could allow doctors to target drugs to specific tissues over a defined period of time.“There’s a growing understanding of the...