by
Loren Bonner, DOTmed News Online Editor | April 24, 2012
From the April 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Although several diagnostics and therapies for nanomedicine have entered Phase I or Phase II clinical trials, the journey of these new technologies from lab to marketplace can’t be truly realized until large-scale safety and efficacy studies are carried out.
The nano team
In order for nanomedicine’s clinical challenges to be met, experts in the field say it’s important to have all scientific communities on board, working together as teams.
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“It is essential to bring together the academic, industrial, regulatory, and ethical and societal players relating to nanotechnology,” says Duncan.
Stanford University works collaboratively with other academic institutions on many of its nanomedicine projects. For example, researchers in Dr. Shan Wang’s lab at Stanford are developing magneto-nano protein chips, or sensors, to directly complement a bioassay test developed at CalTech. Essentially, this is a diagnostic technique that takes blood, serum or tissue samples from a patient and puts it on the magneto-nano sensor chip to detect the tumor markers. A biomarker is a measurable indication that correlates to a specific disease, in this case, brain tumor and lung cancer. And researchers are using biomarkers discovered by both institutions to diagnose cancer early and monitor treatment more effectively.
“This platform is unique because typically, these assays are done
with ELISA [the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay] but the sensitivity is not great and the cross-reactivity of the detector antibodies causes problems in ELISA. But the magneto chip is immune to those and has clear and substantial advantages over many currently existing cancer detection technologies,” says Akin.
At the same time, these researchers are establishing the rules of assay comparisons between different labs and detection technologies, a major hurdle in and of itself in cancer detection and treatment areas.
From researcher to entrepreneur
It’s probably no surprise that many of these interdisciplinary teams want to advance their nanomedicine projects beyond the lab. And many have already taken the leap into the business world.
