One day I was walking back home with one of my family members from our local health clinic, we had just picked up a prescription to treat their diabetes called Metformin, a drug commonly used to treat diabetes in people when diet and exercise have unfortunately not been enough to control blood sugar levels.

We were really hungry, so when we got back home, we immediately ate, this was perfect since the medicine is required to be taken with food which I thought was extremely interesting and at the same time although I did not understand this at all!

A few weeks had passed and all was well, however, one night they began to experience extreme diarrhea, loss of their appetite, and extreme pain in their liver and abdominal areas.

The issue was the medicine. You see, prescription drugs work to tackle areas in your body, in the case of metformin it reduces the amount of sugar your liver excretes into the body and allows your body to react better to insulin. However, prescription drugs often have the ability to also harm parts of the body completely separate from the issue, which is where side effects come in as the medicine not only targets the area of the problem but other parts as well. Although these drugs are given written instructions on what to do to decrease the severity of side effects (in the case of metformin the variable of food works to solve this), they still take place in smaller amounts and begin to accumulate.

So, when we went back to the doctor one day, she told us this was a normal side effect and that there is not really anything you or we can do about it, just try to eat a little less of the medicine, take one tablet instead of two.

Hearing this I was quite baffled and all the more intrigued, on one hand eating the medicine is causing further problems in one’s body and on the other hand to slow this down helps but means putting your body at the risk of high blood sugar levels!

We have been relying on prescription drugs for many years now, and although they save countless lives each year, their efficacy is becoming iffier and iffier.

There is a solution though through the use of nanotechnology!

Nanotechnology

Before delving into how we can better target weaker parts of our body, we need to first learn about the vast universe of nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology: the study of our ability to essentially make things happen at an extremely small scale.

How small you ask? Well, smaller than how we measure specimens in a microscope. That’s right, smaller than a micrometer, and to put it into better perspective a nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter, and it is 100 000 times smaller than a strand of human hair. 🤯

Nanotechnology comes with changes in the physical and chemical properties of materials by simply changing their size and shape. How this works is extremely interesting as you can break up gold known for its shiny yellow colour

and see it become purple and or red in color at such small measurements!

This is because at this scale all normal on the surface is washed away. The conductivity, hardness, reactivity, etc. are all changed when the surface area to volume ratio changes!

It is because of this that nanotechnology has many uses and applications in vast areas such as healthcare and energy.

Going back to our problem of precision medicine, nanotechnology is rising in this area with the ability to solve this issue with drumroll please… 🥁 drug-eluting nanoparticles!

Introducing Drug-Eluting Nanoparticles (DEN’s): Our Body’s Tiny Surgeons

Drug-Eluting NPs, are engineered technologies that can be synthesized from more biological methods such as with amino acids, as well as with materials including gold, and palladium, or a mixture of both! Drug delivery systems with DENs allow for a controlled and maintainable release of drugs and therapeutics to specific areas in the body, resulting in less severe and frequent side effects, as well as the quantity of dosage, putting less strain on areas of your body such as your liver.