Some people think of sci-fi movies or novels when they hear the prefix "nano", and some even some large state-owned enterprises come to mind. However, the so-called "nano-science" deals only with technologies for manipulating particles, structures, and other things at the nanometric, almost molecular, level.

Are nanodrugs more effective than conventional drugs?

Yes, but here we are faced not only with the question of efficiency. In medicine today, the biggest challenge is making drugs as safe as possible by reducing side effects. Anyone and everyone today can go to the pharmacy and buy pills of different colors for the treatment of a variety of ailments and diseases. But the whole question is what is in them, these pills?

The idea is that the doctor of the future will not only prescribe medicines to people, but also make sure that they act in the right place in the right way and that they are not toxic in those regions of the body where we do not need them all. This is exactly what everyone expects when they go to a pharmacy, and from this point of view, nanotechnologies can help us a lot, since they allow, as it were, to “manipulate” the carriers of medicinal effects on a person.

Photo Cornelia Palivan
 Cornelia Palivan, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Basel. unibas.ch
Working with nanotechnology means a kind of attempt to copy nature in order to understand, for example, how a certain given certain protein works in a cell, and if necessary, replace it with an analogue if the original is missing or has disappeared due to illness. In the classic format, drug molecules or drugs are administered to the body as a powder. But there is a risk that under certain certain conditions or situations, medicinal substances simply cannot reach “their” cells. This is because these molecules are too large to be taken in and digested.

An example now widely known to us is RNA vaccines based on ribonucleic acid: after vaccination with such a vaccine, translation from the RNA template begins, a protein is formed in the cell, and this is how the body learns to see the virus and respond to it. Such a ribonucleic acid, or RNA, is precisely embedded in nanoparticles that act as carriers or "vectors". They protect the molecule and transport it to where it is needed, and since such nanoparticles are obtained by chemical means, they are much more easily absorbed by cells.

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