ABSTRACT
Keywords: nanopatterning, nanomaterial design, nanocarriers, drug delivery, nanoarrays, microfluidics, biomolecules, molecular imaging
2.1 IntroductionThe recent emergence of nanotechnology is setting high expectations in biological science and medicine, and many scientists now pre dict that nanotechnology will solve many key questions of biologi cal systems that transpire at the nanoscale. Nanomedicine, broadly defined as the approach of science and engineering at the nanome ter scale toward biomedical applications, has been drawing con siderable attention in the area of nanotechnology. Given that the sizes of functional elements in biology are at the nanometer
scale range, it is not surprising for nanomaterials to interact with biolog ical systems at the molecular level. In addition, nanomaterials have novel electronic, optical, magnetic, and structural properties that cannot be obtained from either individual molecules or bulk materials. These unique features can be precisely tuned in order for scien tists to explore biological phenomena in many ways. For instance, extensive studies have been done with chip-based or solution-based bio-assays, drug delivery, molecular imaging, disease diagnosis, and pharmaceutical screening [1-4].In order to realize these applications, it is crucial to develop methods that investigate and control the binding properties of individual biomolecules at the fundamental nanometer level. This will require enormous time, effort, and inter disciplinary expertise of physical sciences associated with both biol ogy and engineering. The overall goal of nanomedicine is to develop safer and more effective therapeutics as well as novel diagnostic tools. To date, nanotechnology has revolutionized biomedical sci ence step by step not only by improving efficiency and accuracy of current diagnostic techniques, but also by extending scopes for the better understanding of diseases at the molecular level [5-8].
