Big opportunities in a small world

In the future, nanotechnology could be used to fight pathogens.C. ANDERSON/GETTY IMAGES

Mauro Ferrari is on a mission to make Houston a major hub for nanomedicine. Housed at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Ferrari's lab will become the Department of Nanomedicine and Biomedical Engineering in September. According to Ferrari, it will be the first nanomedicine department at a US medical school. The nanomedicine professor, whose team is developing nanosized diagnostic devices to treat cancer and cardiovascular disease, is in an enviable position, especially given the current economic climate. Ferrari plans to recruit another 30 researchers to complete his 100-member academic research team, and he has co-founded two companies. NanoMedical Systems, in Austin, Texas, is developing a nanomaterial-based drug-delivery system, and Leonardo Biosystems in Houston is researching nanotechnology-based cancer therapeutics.

Houston is already well known for its prowess in the nanoscopic field. The city was home to the 1985 discovery of spherical carbon-based fullerenes known as 'buckyballs'. That work was later awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yet so far, nanotech advances have been more incremental than monumental. This could be set to change as research funds start to flow, nanomedicines head to clinical trials and entrepreneurial academics aim to incorporate nanomedicine into mainstream medical care.

Governments around the world are banking on high economic returns as they invest in a field that aims to use atomic- or molecular-level techniques to repair damaged tissue or diagnose, treat or prevent disease. Academics are forging multidisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers and clinicians eager to test nanosolutions to medical problems. But there are challenges. The field needs greater numbers of highly trained students, and a sound regulatory infrastructure.

Houston isn't the only budding nanomedicine hub. In the United Kingdom, Swansea University, with input from Ferrari, has brought together teams of clinicians, life scientists, engineers, physical scientists and industry professionals. The university will break ground this summer on its £21.6-million (US$35-million) Centre for NanoHealth, which will be the cornerstone of a plan to grow its schools of medicine and engineering. The building is slated to open in 2010, and Swansea University administrators are searching for researchers eager to cross disciplinary boundaries. Over the next year, they will begin to fill 12 core research posts, including the centre manager, academic posts and clinicians to support the centre's mission.

The key to successful growth of a nanomedicine hub, say the organizers, is forging industry partnerships. One of Swansea University's spin-off companies — Haemair, also based in Swansea — has developed a blood oxygenating system to help patients with impaired breathing.

The centre's co-director Steven Conlan says that four more companies are being developed. Based on past job-creation initiatives, Gareth Morgan, the head of Swansea's school of medicine, expects the centre to create up to 450 jobs over the next five years, many in small and medium-sized partner companies. Conlan says the centre will build on the university's strengths in engineering and physical sciences to first focus on developing nanotech devices, such as in vivo sensors. People trained in rheology, scanning microscopy, biochemistry, device fabrication and chemistry will be in demand as the centre develops high-tech platforms to be licensed and commercialized.

Mauro Ferrari, left, and Shad Thaxton both work at the cutting edge of nanomedicine.M. LANDRY/UNIV. TEXAS HEALTH SCI. CENTER, HOUSTON

Such institutional configurations mirror a merging of nanotechnology and medical career paths. Shad Thaxton was halfway through his urology training in 2002 when he read about the nanotechnology research in Chad Mirkin's laboratory. Both were at Northwestern University in Illinois — Mirkin at the Evanston campus and Thaxton in Chicago — and they began exploring nanotechnology's potential impact on medicine. Thaxton completed his medical degree and built on his clinical and research experience to learn how to synthesize and characterize nanoparticles. With an eye towards repairing atherosclerotic damage, Thaxton — now an assistant professor at Northwestern University — is working to develop a synthetic nanoparticle that mimics the action of high-density lipoprotein, which is thought to help remove cholesterol from within arteries.

Mirkin, a chemist by training, has so far integrated three medical doctors into his Northwestern nanomedicine research group. "The doctors give us the opportunity not just to do great science, but to explore nanotherapeutics as well," he says. With more than $450 million in funding, Mirkin's International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University covers a broad range of topics — from intracellular gene regulation to developing new materials that can penetrate tumours.

Like Ferrari, Mirkin has an entrepreneurial bent. He formed Nanosphere, a molecular-diagnostics company in Northbrook, Illinois. Mirkin typically recruits individuals with strong backgrounds in physics, chemistry or medicine who also demonstrate the ability to conduct novel, interdisciplinary nanotechnology research. "We have one of the largest operations in the world, and we're always hiring," he says.

Others are boasting similar good fortune. Freddy Boey Yin Chiang, head of materials science and engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, has benefited from Singapore's growing financial support for nanomedicine. He has recruited graduate students, postdocs and researchers from the United States and Europe, and he hopes to lure more as he expands his lab by 20 faculty positions during the next few years. "My problem is not capacity, it is finding good people," he says.

Many labs share Boey's dilemma. Although there is a multitude of opportunities, finding people with the requisite skills for this interdisciplinary field can be difficult. "We need people who have developed an intuition about multiscale systems — those who can think about the particle or structure that is one billionth of a metre and its potential role in a device that is a few centimetres in size," says Randy Goodall, chief executive of NanoMedical Systems.

Vladimir Zharov, director of the Phillips Classic Laser and Nanomedicine Laboratories at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, has had difficulty finding individuals with the mix of experience necessary to develop laser-activated gold nanoparticles to treat cancer. In May he received US National Cancer Institute funding to conduct a first-of-its-kind clinical trial of nanomedicine technology related to early cancer diagnosis.

Zharov sees a large education gap that, at the moment, 'on-the-job' training must bridge. "We need more combined degrees," he says. Unfortunately, a lack of qualified instructors has meant that such cross-disciplinary training is not easy to accomplish. "Training may be the weakest piece of the nanomedicine enterprise," agrees Laurent Lévy, chief executive of Nanobiotix, a nanomedicine company in Paris working to achieve more potent, targeted radiotherapy.

Medical schools are beginning to heed the call. Starting this autumn, University College London (UCL) will offer a master's of science in nanotechnology and regenerative medicine. "It takes a long time to get into the nanotech field, so we thought it would be useful to have a course that would help students to start a research project and lead them to a PhD," says Alexander Seifalian, a biomaterials researcher and programme course leader. He says the course includes a hands-on workshop to expose students to nanotech research opportunities related to regenerative medicine. UCL will accept 10 students this year, with plans to increase enrolment to 25 students in subsequent years.

In addition to its doctorate programmes, Swansea University will start running an MSc in nanomedicine this year. "We need a new breed of students," says Conlan. The university is also looking to build industry–academia partnerships that would provide industry experience for postdocs.

As nanomedicine technologies inch closer to market, establishing a regulatory road map has the potential to create more career opportunities. To date, most researchers have focused on developing biomaterials or designing better particles. But regulators with science training will be in demand to assess safety and efficacy. The need to understand the health effects of nanotech exposure is growing with the field, says Sally Tinkle, senior science adviser at the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. In April, the institute earmarked some of its federal economic stimulus funds to support nanomaterials and medicinal research, hoping to develop tools and methods to assess the safety of nanomaterials. "When you measure a drug-delivery system that targets a tumour, you also need to measure clearance of nanomaterials from the system," says Tinkle.

Likewise, preclinical characterization of nanoparticles intended for cancer therapeutics and diagnostics is in demand. Scott McNeil runs the Nanotechnology Characterization Laboratory, a National Cancer Institute facility in Frederick, Maryland. He started the programme in 2005 with eight scientists. Since then, the lab has helped characterize, at some level, 150 different nanoparticle types. Now, his current team of 20 chemists, physicists, biologists and toxicologists are all kept busy conducting full characterizations, from particle-size distribution to in vivo toxicity, of new nanoparticle submissions.

McNeil says that scientists working with the first generation of nanomedicinal particles simply took advantage of the small particle size to achieve novel drug properties — for example, the reformulation of the chemotherapy drug Doxil (doxorubicin) to boost the amount of chemotherapeutic drug routed to the malignant cells. Now, says McNeil, researchers have learned how to engineer specific properties at the nanoscale. This requires additional characterization work by his team. He is recruiting for senior researchers and postdocs to keep up with demand.

Like work at most frontiers, nanomedicine is rife with opportunities and challenges. "Nanomedicine has unbelievable transformational potential," says Ferrari. "But we must be as brave, persistent and smart as the biotechnology innovators were when that field was emerging 20 years ago."