Less than twenty years ago photolithography and medicine were total strangers to one
another. They had not yet met, and not even looking each other up in the classifieds. And
then, nucleic acid chips, microfluidics and microarrays entered the scene, and rapidly these
strangers became indispensable partners in biomedicine.
As recently as ten years ago the notion of applying nanotechnology to the fight against disease
was dominantly the province of the fiction writers. Thoughts of nanoparticle-vehicled
delivery of therapeuticals to diseased sites were an exercise in scientific solitude, and grounds
for questioning one’s ability to think “like an established scientist”. And today we have
nanoparticulate paclitaxel as the prime option against metastatic breast cancer, proteomic
profiling diagnostic tools based on target surface nanotexturing, nanoparticle contrast agents
for all radiological modalities, nanotechnologies embedded in high-distribution laboratory
equipment, and no less than 152 novel nanomedical entities in the regulatory pipeline in
the US alone.