The Nanofacturing consortium has worked on a pan-European nanopharmaceutical project to develop new manufacturing methods and improve supply chain co-ordination to advance treatments for rare cancers, autoimmune diseases and viral infections. The Nanofacturing collaboration has accelerated the development of nanotechnologies with the goal of bringing more targeted and effective therapies to market.
For more information see the IDTechEx report on Biobased Polymers 2018-2023. Specifically, the eight-partner project has centred upon the processing of glycan-coated gold nanoparticles, which have the ability to circulate freely in the blood and, with the addition of targeting ligands, to preferentially enter diseased cells or antigen-processing cells of the immune system.
These small nanoparticles, to which therapeutic drugs or immunotherapeutic peptides can be attached, can pass across blood vessels to deliver medicine directly to diseased sites before being excreted from the body.
Areitio Junquera, Project Co-Ordinator from Midatech Pharma, said:
“This rapidly emerging technology has the potential to deliver drugs more effectively and in a kinder way to patients. Preclinical studies have demonstrated how highly toxic, anti-cancer drugs can be specifically targeted to tumour cells while sparing normal tissue, and how antigenic peptides can be delivered with improved potency to the immune system. Over the course of the project, clinical grade gold nanoparticle treatments have been manufactured and are now being investigated in clinical trials.”
Nanocarriers, which include glycan-coated gold nanoparticles, are forecast to account for 40 per cent of a $136 billion nanotechnology-enabled drug delivery market by 2021(1). However, their development has previously suffered from a number of challenges, with scale-up of production from pre-clinical, laboratory scale to clinical testing hampered by a lack of pilot manufacturing capacity and supply chain infrastructure. High development costs have also prevented SMEs from taking gold nanoparticle drug programs to commercialisation.
News This Week
Watch Elon Musk’s Neuralink presentation
Electric vehicles, rockets... and now brain-computer interfaces. Elon Musk's newest venture, Neuralink, aims to bridge the gap between humans and artificial intelligence by implanting tiny chips that can link up to the brain. [...]
Could prosthetic limbs one day be controlled by human thought?
For almost two decades, Stanford electrical engineering professor Krishna Shenoy and neuroscientists in his Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory have been working on implantable brain sensors that allow them to record and decipher the electrical [...]
Scientists Just Unveiled The First-Ever Photo of Quantum Entanglement
In an incredible first, scientists have captured the world's first actual photo of quantum entanglement - a phenomenon so strange, physicist Albert Einstein famously described it as 'spooky action at a distance'. The image [...]
Australian Researchers Have Just Released The World’s First AI-Developed Vaccine
A team at Flinders University in South Australia has developed a new vaccine believed to be the first human drug in the world to be completely designed by artificial intelligence (AI). While drugs have [...]
Europe is designing satellites that ‘surf’ their way past space debris
Humans routinely send spacecraft into orbit to ensure services on the ground and to explore other planets. This extraordinary ability comes with a great responsibility: our space activity risks contaminating the space surrounding the [...]
Black (nano) gold to combat climate change
Global warming is a serious threat to the planet and living beings. One of the main causes of global warming is the increase in the atmospheric CO2 level. The main source of this CO2 [...]
Ethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Digital information technology has made information readily accessible to practically anyone, anytime and anywhere. This has had a profound effect in shaping all aspects of our society from industrial manufacturing, to distribution, to the [...]
SpaceX targets 2021 commercial Starship launch
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The first commercial mission for SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy launch system will likely take place in 2021, a company executive said June 26. Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX’s vice president of commercial [...]
How a healthy microbiome could supercharge the body’s natural cancer-fighting cells
The ways in which the communities of bacteria living within our bodies influence our overall well-being are becoming better understood all the time, and with that better understanding comes potential new ways to intervene [...]
Cancer breakthrough: Scientists discover a new Achilles’ Heel of tumors that causes them to self-destruct
Scientists have identified the Achilles' Heel of cancerous tumors, forcing the disease-spreading cells to over-stress and self-destruct. Experiments showed blocking a specific protein that fuels tumors kills them off. The technique worked on a [...]
Improved technique for using magnetic nanoclusters to kill hard-to-reach tumors
Researchers at Oregon State University have developed an improved technique for using magnetic nanoclusters to kill hard-to-reach tumors. Magnetic nanoparticles - tiny pieces of matter as small as one-billionth of a meter - [...]
A water repellent ‘nanoflower’ for biomedical applications
Plant leaves have a natural superpower — they’re designed with water repelling characteristics. Called a superhydrophobic surface, this trait allows leaves to cleanse themselves from dust particles. Inspired by such natural designs, a [...]
Upgrade Your Memory With a Surgically Implanted Chip
In a grainy black-and-white video shot at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, a patient sits in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in a bandage. He’s trying to recall 12 words for a memory [...]
Video: Amplifying the impact of scientific innovations
From Frontiers Forum: How can research translate to R&D? Or a whole new business venture? In a panel session at Science Unlimited 2019, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group CEO Stefan von Holtzbrinck, Life Biosciences CEO [...]
Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked
More and more security holes are appearing in cryptocurrency and smart contract platforms, and some are fundamental to the way they were built. Early last month, the security team at Coinbase noticed something strange [...]
Supercapacitor nano-architecture: designing a plant-powered future
“The most crucial result of this work is the correlation between form and function in supercapacitor materials,” states first author Dina Ibrahim Abouelamaiem. She elaborates that “our research is driven by the need for [...]
Leave A Comment