16/11/2011

Expoquimia, the reference event in the chemical industry in southern Europe held in Barcelona, hosted on 16 November a round table that discussed the nanotechnology applied to medicine. The director of Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), Dr Joan Comella, acted as moderator in a debate where participated Dr Simó Schwartz Jr, head of CIBBIM-Nanomedicine at VHIR, along with Dr. Jaume Veciana Miró, from the Materials Science Institute of Barcelona, Dr. José Luis Jiménez Fuentes, from the Molecular Immunobiology Center at Hospital Gregorio Marañón and Dr. Maria Jesús Vicent, from Príncipe Felipe Research Center in Valencia.The topics discussed, in addition to individual presentations of each of the centers, included clinical applications for diagnosis and treatment and the development of nanomedicine. The main conclusion is that nanomedicine shows a great potential for early diagnosis of diseases and new treatments, because counting with exact doses that go directly to the outbreak of the disease is the major challenge. A new hope for the future with which could be possible to direct drugs to make them more efficient combining the therapeutic function with drugs to act only in the damaged part of the body and not contaminate the rest of unnecessary and harmful toxins. Nanomedicine may become one of the alternative routes to aggressive treatment such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy, with numerous side effects on the patient's body.