Nano-pharmacies

Bioengineers at Cornell University have been at work on bionic motors that can target specific cells in the body. These machines could conceivably travel through the body and release exact doses of chemotherapy drugs, for instance, to cancer cells and not to any healthy tissues in the body. The device is a hybrid: a biological molecular motor attached to a metallic substrate only a few nanometers in length. For the moment, the researchers have only been able to achieve a link between the molecular motor, in this case an ATP-based molecule, and a metallic substrate like copper or gold. At the moment, they still need to develop a more complex metallic substrate to give the motor some brains. Once they can etch circuitry onto the metal, information can be stored and processed, making these nano-pharmacies a reality.

Replacement nerve cells

Researchers at the University of California in San Diego created a box the size of a car stereo that could substitute for a damaged nerve cell. They replaced a damaged nerve cell in a California spiny lobster -- one of the 14 nerve cells that drives its digestive muscles -- with electronic circuitry. It's the first step toward true cybernetic technology that could one day be used to replace damaged nerves in human patients -- and, ultimately, lost limbs. Now they just need to figure out how to shrink the electronics.

Pill alternatives

Based on a technology originally developed for TV picture tube production, Delsys, a three-year-old company in Princeton, New Jersey, has developed a new process for pharmaceutical production. Imagine licking a strip of plastic rather than swallowing a pill for your medication. The active ingredients in most medications and over-the-counter drugs comprise only a small percent of the actual pill. But by laying down the medication onto a substrate, you eliminate the need for comparatively clumsy capsules. Another advantage to this delivery method is that patients taking multiple medications can have a customized set of strips, each containing all their medications. One strip replaces a handful of pills and a full glass of water.

Injection by osmosis

Needleless injection devices have been around for some time, but one Oregon company, Bioject, is close to making them a mass-market reality. Bioject's needleless devices work by using high-pressure modules to push the medication through the skin. By being forced through the skin's pores, the medication finds the path of least resistance. It causes less trauma to the skin than needle injection. It is also a more efficient delivery method since the medication enters along many tiny microchannels through the skin's pores. (With a needle, the action of the injection creates a pool of medication that needs to break up and absorb).

At-home blood tests

Waiting for what doctors call "blood work" to get back from the lab is an annoying fact of life in the medical world. But a California company, Nanogen, is developing "biochips" to take care of this problem. A biochip looks and works much like a regular silicon-based microprocessor, but it has an added feature: about 10,000 micro-size wells dot the chip, allowing it to sample any biological-chemical elements and perform the tests that are normally done in beakers in labs. The automated process would take just a few minutes, and has applications in hospital emergency rooms and in the home. Blood tests can be performed simply by sticking the device on drawn blood and can also detect the existence of any air-borne viruses by swiping the device through the air.

Viral vectors

One more development gaining ground is viral vectors. Viral vectors use actual viruses, like HIV, to combat genetic illnesses. Viruses are essentially complex yet efficient delivery systems. Under normal circumstances, they deliver information that disrupts cells, but viral vector processes extract the bad information and replace it with new information that can be delivered to affected cells and tissues.

Decoding DNA

The government's Human Genome Project is facing stiff competition from VC-financed biotech companies like Celera Genomics Group, a separately traded subsidiary of the PE Corporation, which claims it will complete the sequencing of the human genome in 2001, years ahead of government labs. Though private companies would love to patent their discovered gene sequences, Patent Office rules regarding such practices have yet to be solidified. In the meantime, companies have decided to make an end run by offering to sell their information to pharmaceutical companies. Designing genetically adhering drug therapies is one of the immediate benefits of sequencing the human genome. Novartis A.G., Amgen and Pharmacia & Upjohn have already signed on with Celera.

--Edmund Lee