ABSTRACT
Nanomedicine, the application of nanotechnologies to the health care sector, offers numerous improvements to conventional medical diagnosis, drug delivery, therapy and implants. The European Science Foundation has defi ned nanomedicine as “the science and technology of diagnosing, treating and preventing disease and traumatic injury, of relieving pain, and of preserving and improving human health, using molecular tools and molecular knowledge of the human body” (ESF 2005). Medical nanotechnology involves the engineering, design, fabrication and application of drugs and medical devices that are about 1-100 nm in size or incorporate nanomaterials of this size into their structure. A somewhat speculative projection is that by 2014 the market for pharmaceutical applications of nanotechnology alone will be close to US$18 billion per year. Moreover, commentators have suggested that the demand for nanotechnology-based medical products within the US market alone will increase by 17% a year to US$53 billion in 2011 and US$110 billion in 2016 (Harris and Bawa 2007).
