Using the tricks of the electronics industry to aid in the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of human disease

POLY 408

Joseph M DeSimone, desimone@unc.edu, Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB #3290 Venable and Kenan Laboratories, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3290
The delivery of therapeutic, detection and imaging agents for the diagnosis and treatment of disease has improved dramatically with the development of nano-carriers such as liposomes, micelles, dendrimers, polymer particles, and colloidal precipitates. However, all of these nanostructures are derived from “bottom-up” chemical approaches which yield heterogeneous structures having no shape specificity and little capability for the rational design of uniform vectors having a broad-based window of efficacy. The microelectronics industry on the other hand has evolved to the point where the shape-specific nano-scale features of an integrated circuit, such as transistors, can be mass fabricated with precision at the nanometer scale. My laboratory has embarked upon a program to adapt and merge the precision, uniformity and mass production concepts associated with the microelectronics industry to generate and solution harvest extremely versatile organic carriers having specific chemical functionality and tailored mechanical properties for application in nano-medicine.