Nanotechnology in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries

Bionanotechnology is moving forward rapidly. It will enhance our understanding of biology and how biological systems work and is already helping resolve some of the pharma and biotech industries' significant problems. Dr Mike Fisher of the UK's Nanotechnology Knowledge Transfer Network (NanoKTN) gives an overview of its potential.

In 1959, American physicist Richard Feynman made a speech at CalTech, where he stated that ‘the principles of physics... do not speak against the possibility of manoeuvring things atom by atom’ when discussing his vision of ‘a billion tiny factories, which are manufacturing simultaneously’ [1]. This is widely acknowledged as the first reference to nanotechnology.

Put simply nanotechnology is the technology of manipulating materials, devices, or systems at the nanometer scale. The term therefore does not apply to a particular industry sector, but can be applied across many. Nanotechnology can be applied to diverse areas from cosmetics to computing and from textiles to targeted drugs.

Currently the biotechnology and pharmaceuticals industries are facing pressures to decrease their expenditures as the total cost of getting a biologic drug to market has spiralled to over $1.2 billion, according to Tufts Centre for the Study of Drug Discovery [2]. Companies are therefore looking to improve the discovery and development processes and gain more information about a new molecular entity (NME) to allow go/no go decisions to be made about a drug much earlier in the development stages.

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