Content area
Full text
Chemical engineers are at the forefront of this rapidly developing field, with the potential to propel discoveries from the bench to bedside.
Nanotechnology has made tremendous strides in the last decade, emerging first as a basic science and then rapidly as an engineering discipline. In particular, nanotechnology as applied to biology and medicine has attracted significant interest because of the unique properties of nanomaterials and their size similarity to biological components.
Within the nanotechnology discipline, the terms bionanotechnology and nanobiotechnology are often used interchangeably; however, they refer to two separate fields of study (Figure 1). Here, biological nanotechnology will be used to denote both fields.
The first term, bionanotechnology, refers to the application of nanotechnology concepts to biological systems. In this field, a biological entity is engineered to perform a certain function, such as binding to a specific molecule or transporting small objects across a surface.
The term nanobiotechnology refers to the application of nanomaterials produced via chemical processes to the field of biology. Concepts ranging from colloid and surface science to particle catalysis are applied to the field of biology.
The field of nanotechnology emerged in the 1980s with the discovery of carbon-based nanostructures and the refinement of manufacturing processes for semiconductor quantum dots and magnetic and metallic nanostructures. The entry of nanotechnology into the biological milieu was precipitated by a series of key papers in the late 1990s that described gold nanoparticles for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) detection (J) and quantum dots for biological imaging (2, 3). Alongside these developments, researchers were also beginning to manipulate biological structures in new ways - for example, creating aptamers, which are specific sequences of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and DNA designed to bind to specific target molecules (4). Together, these developments led to the burgeoning application of nanotechnology to biology and vice versa.
AIChE's Society for Biological Engineering (SBE) and its Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum (NSEF) sponsor a biennial International Conference on Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (ICBN) to highlight the role of chemical and biochemical engineering in these fields. This article explores some of the recent trends and future directions in biological nanotechnology discussed at the most recent ICBN conference (June 2012), focusing specifically on the importance of chemical engineering concepts in this arena.
A foundation in...