Prof. Mauro Ferrari will give a keynote lecture in the up-and-coming ILSI-BioMed week, regarding the ways in which Nanotechnology Enables Individualized Medicine

A friend of mine came to me recently with an interesting question. Both he and his wife suffer from headaches, and while he can take a single tablet of acamol to make the pain go away, his wife is almost unaffected by the tablets, which makes her quite grouchy – and leads in turn to him having an headache again. Why is that?

As anyone in the field of medicine can tell you, the reason for this peculiar phenomenon is that each person responds in a different manner to the same drug. Our enzymes metabolize the drugs in the liver, stomach, intestine and the bloodstream, and almost no person carries exactly the same set of genes & enzymes. This may not be a serious issue with acamol, where you can just take another tablet if your enzymes work overtime, but it could be life threatening with more potent drugs like the ones used in chemotherapy.

So how do we design drugs and methods that will enable each patient to receive his maximum-efficacy dose? There are several answers to that question. Some suggest the use of nano-sensors that can determine which genes the patient has and how they influence his or her metabolism. Unfortunately, we still don’t know everything we would like to know about the relationship between genetics and epigenetics and drug metabolism.

Another option is the one taken by Prof. Mauro Ferrari, who is about to give a lecture in this year’s ILSI-BioMed week about the ways in which Nanotechnology Enables Individualized Medicine. There are still no abstracts in the program, but judging from my knowledge of Prof. Ferrari’s work, at least some of the lecture will be about the ‘intelligent implants’ he’s developing in his lab. According to his website these silicon-based chops contain nano-scale channels, with different sizes and surface-chemistry, which can release drugs at a various rates for period of several months. A small electrical field across the channel can further grant the ability to actively control the release rates, and thus provides the “opportunity to develop smart pre-programmed, remotely activated and self-regulated delivery implants”.
Prof. Ferrari will give his keynote lecture on the fourth day of the conference, Wednesday, June 16, 2010.

Prof. Ferrari’s CV