Hello everyone. We hear a lot about nanotechnology. It's become a buzzword in last few years, maybe about 15 years or so.
The question is, where is nanotechnology? Do we see in our everyday life? Do we experience this?
Do we have this technology at our disposal? The answer is yes. This is something that has changed how we do everyday things, starting from waking up to an alarm clock.
Many times it's iPhone where we put like three. clock three alarms and our spouses don't like it or for students they put on those gong sound on their ipads making our coffees switching on your tv all the way to the time that we go to sleep and we have to check our facebook feed once again it's everywhere and something that What has made this to work is it took over about 40-50 years. So the third industrial revolution as we call it, microelectronics or electronics, especially integrated circuits when we brought all those components, resistors, capacitors, inductors, and we put them on what we call silicon.
So silicon-based. electronics is everywhere. We used to have television sets where we had vacuum tube. Many of millennium kids, they have no idea what I just said, but older folks would know that we had to turn those TV sets on and we had to wait for a few minutes, maybe a couple of minutes before we could see the screen pop up. And that changed once we had the electronics in the form of solid state electronics, which essentially changed or revolutionized our lives.
And that has helped us develop systems, develop the mediums where we can control things at nanoscale. And when I say nanoscale, I literally mean at atomic scale. Now we can control...
Material, we can control material properties, we can handle material at nanoscale. An example is braille code. We all know what is braille code, those risen dots. If you haven't ever seen a braille code, I would say next time when you push a button for an elevator, you will see there will be dots next to that number of the floor. That's basically braille.
We feel braille with our bare fingers, but think if you live in North or in colder areas and we use mittens or gloves, if you try to feel those dots we cannot feel it. So essentially the point is that to work at nanoscale we need to have tools and we need to have means to deal with those things at nanoscale and now we have those things which is what has broad nanotechnology in our everyday life. When I say in every aspect of our life, here is an example. This looks like people in developing countries, in developed world, especially this picture is from Europe, from a friend of mine who showed at a conference. But this is not so different than any developing country as well.
Where do we see nanotechnology? We may not be able to comprehend, but essentially it is everywhere. Starting from our cell phones, our computers, the frames of our bikes.
Again, older folks would know the bikes we used to ride, they were like a ton heavy. But now we have those bikes that we can lift just with one hand. The frames, the material of those bikes, the tires, even cosmetics.
We have nanoparticles in sunblocks. It is already everywhere. Now speaking of this picture and thinking about the poor areas of the world, I remember I landed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a few years ago, my first time. And I could see the cycle rickshaws. It's a thing where people drive those things and you sit at the back.
They would have two cell numbers written on their cycle rickshaws, which means they would have two cell phones, even the cycle rickshaws. That neurotechnology is everywhere, all around the world, in slums, in all segments of our economy. What does that mean? How does that help us if we talk about healthcare?
How does that help us if we talk about different aspects of our body or specifically medicine? We can now interface... Living systems at smaller scales and knowing that many of the diseases, especially cancer, which is the topic today as well, has its origin at genes, at mutations.
So now we have developed tools or we have developed devices, nanopores, cantilevers, we have nanowires, nanotubes. Quantum dots, nanoparticles, so many things at that scale which possibly we can interface the living things at that scale. Going back to that example of Braille and with bare fingers, now we have tools that we can do something about it.
And of course at larger scale we have had so many ways of medical interventions, medical diagnostics and therapy at organ scale, at skeletal scale. But now We need to do something about our diseases which have their known roots at molecular scale. And that's where the technology, what we call nanotechnology or microelectronics, can help us. And think about it. Think about the growth or the control that we have.
Seven billion people or so on the face of this earth, and seven billion components that IBM made on a... computer chip last year, which is one centimeter by one centimeter. So if we can make seven billion devices, we can really interface life at really small scale.
And that is something which should give us motivation to do something about human mortality. Very interestingly, for last 50, 60 years, probably that's when we have started gathering data or at least started classifying the causes of death. Human mortality from cancer has not gone down.
Think about it. We are still dying at the same rate, although now we have known toxic effects of so many things. We have so many regulations. We don't have leaded gas. Again, older folks would know we used to have all kind of emissions.
We would be sending out... Despite all those, what do you call them, the betterment in the quality of life, we are still dying at the same rate, which essentially should motivate us that there is something that drastically needs to change. And that's where nanotechnology or control at micro and nano scale is. is helping us derive and come up with new ways. And there are many ways how we can do it. There's many ways how it's been already shown.
We can separate out cells based on their electrical behavior, something called dielectrophoresis. We can use magnetic nanoparticles and coat them with certain antibodies which would specifically bind to cancer cells and separate them out magnetically. We can coat surfaces and capture tumor cells from a given body fluid, which can be blood, urine, saliva, even human tears, which carry those known molecules which are indicative of the, what do you call, health or a disease going on. We can look at the tumor cells and look at their mechanical properties by by sucking in a single cell at a time in a format of what we call capillary electrophoresis.
So there are so many ways how it's been done, and especially after Human Genome Project, we know now many of genes and proteins which are known to be related to cancer, much like we know cholesterol is related to heart disease. We know many of the... the proteins or molecules which are related to to cancers. We do have some tests, what you call screening tests for a few cancers, but there are so many other types of cancers which have no screening tools, which have no way of even finding whether a metastatic potential exists in a given tumor or that or not. So that's where nanoscale approaches can help us.
So I'll give you a couple of examples where we can capture tumor cells and those aggressive Tumor cells show a very distinctive dancing behavior on a nanotextured device or a nanotextured substrate, which is different than what you would see for a non-metastatic tumor cell or just a regular cell from that organ. This is an approach which can help us objectively identify whether there are tumor cells in a given sample, again. simple bodily fluids, or we can interrogate each individual cell at any given time, much like bouncers in a bar. If you guys are young like me and try to get into a club, they would ask for ID.
I also have some white hair, but they would still ask for that, and I feel honored. They think I'm a young guy. So think about it.
A bouncer? interrogates and checks each individual person before he or she goes in. This is something we can implement for cells as well.
So the idea is if you can create a small orifice micropore in a very thin membrane, a nanoscale membrane, 100 nanometer or 200 nanometer thin and let cells flow through You can measure ionic current across that channel and see when a cell goes through in the form of a dip in the current. And that is essentially what would turn into a pulse, which would be a dip in the ionic current. And we can use those pulses to identify those cells based on their mechanical, physical, and chemical behavior. Those single pulses can... Tell us about not just whether a cell is normal, but even if that cell is metastatic or non-metastatic.
So this is some data which we have gathered where we can identify between those two types of cells. Why is that important? Think about a simple tumor, breast cancer. We feel or we have been given to...
Perceive that breast cancer is completely treatable, which is not the truth. Majority of breast cancer patients die of recurrence because of metastasis, because there is no easy or direct way to look and differentiate between indolent cells and metastatic cells. So this might be a way where we can look at a given sample and define the strategy. to deal with that type of cancer instead of giving same treatment to all patients, which is essentially over-diagnosis, over-treatment, where we might end up giving the same chemotherapy to a patient even though their disease is not metastatic in nature.
But that's, again, a potential of nanotechnology in differentiating those cells or those... diseased behaviors at single cell level. And not just that, there are other unknown questions. Questions like micrometastasis, questions where we don't know the subpopulations within a tumor, where we might have many, many different types of cells of cancerous nature, but they exist all together in a given lump.
But we don't have a direct way of knowing each one of those. If we can develop technologies further and narrow down and find and cloud them based on their behavior, we might be able to treat each individual patient based on their signatures, which is the concept behind what we call... Personalized medicine or precision medicine or nanomedicine, these are all buzzwords centered around the theme that one-size-fits-all kind of therapy is not the way to go because each individual person would have their own type of micrometastasis, they may have stem cells in their tumor which needs to be treated differently.
So nanotechnologies have This strength where we can look for the behaviors of cells at cellular and sub-cellular scales and look for genomic and proteomic makeup of those cells, which would give us a complete picture of what lies within the enemy. And knowing the enemy is the first step towards defeating the enemy. Thank you for your attention.