In the field of medical science, nanoparticles are immensely being used now days. Nanoparticles are particularly used in drug delivery, in drug discovery, diagnostics and innovation in medical science.
To deliver the drug to tiny area with in the body, nanoparticles are being used. Nanoparticles can be used to increase the solubility of drug at a specific and required target sites within the body.
This increases the capacity of drugs which are poorly soluble and thus makes them suitable for specific treatment in spite of their poor solubility by directly targeting the tiny area where the drug action is required. This is also known as drug bioavailability. Many of the anticancer drugs are successfully made or formulated using such nanomaterials. In this list well know drugs used for anticancer are dexamethasone, doxorubicin 5-fluorouracil, paclitaxel etc.
Drug like dexamethasone are anti-proliferative as well as anti-inflammatory effects . These drugs binds to specified receptors known as cytoplasmic receptors and the subsequent complex of drug and receptor is transported to cell nucleus. This results in certain genes expression which is controlling proliferation of cell and thus acts as anti-cancer drug in a more effective way with the help of nanotechnology and their nanoparticles. In the field of medicine, effective drug distribution and drug toxicity is an issue, but the introduction of nanoparticles with certain surface properties for targeted drug delivery reduces or almost eliminates drug toxicity and makes drug distribution more effective. Small bio-molecules like peptides, proteins , amino acids and nucleotides loaded nanoparticles are capable of escaping the immune system and thus are more efficient in targeting particular tissue or particular diseases.
Nanotechnology has been a revolution in the field of diagnosis of diseases and their timely treatment. Gold nanoparticles are used as ultra sensitive fluorescent probes and thus these probes are used to detect easily cancer biomarkers in the blood .This method is so sensitive that it can be employed to detect directly even the microscopic bacterial DNA and also viruses.
Nanoparticles are able to carry killer genes which suppress growth of ovarian tumor and thus can be used to treat ovarian cancer. At present this is being tried on mice and the results are outstanding. This will be promising technology in treatment of cancers in human being with the use of nanoparticles. Nanoparticles are effectively used in the treatment of diphtheria. The toxin which is killing the cell of bacteria which result in diphtheria diseases is made available with the help of nanoparticles to the patients. Nanopartcle can deliver genes which are resulting in the production of diphtheria toxin. Apart from the above uses, there are so many applications of nanoparticles. Nanoparticles are used as effective tools in improvement of stem cell therapy. More specifically , with the use of nanoparticles in stem cell therapy , muscle degeneration is reduced ,increase regeneration of vascular tissues which are already damaged, stimulate formation of new blood vessels which are implanted into living organisms and results in keeping the tissue alive for long time.
Nanoparticles can also be used in the manufacturing of vaccines of deadly diseases like anthrax. In this, with the size of only 200 nanometers, the immune system is stimulated as it is specifically triggered and also this avoids pathogenicity. Immunity stimulation is important but at the same time, pathogenicity should be controlled for any vaccine and its effective application.
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