The 2006 Industrial Physics Forum has ended, and sadly, I didn't get a chance to blog about every single one of the fascinating topics featured by the slate of speakers -- there were just too many. Here's a few of the remaining things I would have blogged about, had time (and wireless access!) permitted:
* I mentioned Paul Alivisatos' work on nanocrystal-based solar cells in the previous post. He's also exploring the possibility of inorganic colloidal nanocrystals as an alternative to quantum dots in fluorescent biological labeling applications. Alivisatos found that these types of structures (particle plasmons, in this case), when coupled -- a property that is strongly dependent on distance between the particles -- exhibit distinctly different properties than in the single state.
Specifically, the Berkeley group measured the light scattering of such coupled plasmon pairs in DNA cutting experiments, and found that the intensity goes up right before the cutting, then drops rapidly afterwards. (It happens because the enzyme used as a cutting tool bends the DNA slightly right before cutting it.) This produces very different light scattering patterns, thereby providing a unique "signature." Alivisatos calls his technique a "plasmon ruler," and believes it could offer advantages over the use of quantum dots/fluorescent dyes, since it can make masurements over a larger length scale: between 1 and 70 nanometers, compared to between 1 and 10 nanometers using the conventional FRET technique.
* Concerns about environmental and health risks aside, nanoparticles can help clean up soil and groundwater contamination. Wei-xian of Lehigh University talked about his work with zero-valent iron nanoparticle technology, which is proving quite popular for remediation and treatment applications: everything from chlorinated organic solvents and organochlorine pesticides, to PCBs, perchlorate and hexavalent chromium. Recent advances have made these nanoparticles much more cost effective for large-scale applications. (Related side note: The New York Times ran an interesting article on November 10 about Rice University researchers who are using rust-like particles to clean up arsenic contamination.)
* During the Frontiers in Physics session, Wim Leemans, who heads the LOASIS program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, gave an overview and a few recent achievements in the area of laser-plasma wakefield accelerators -- basically a tabletop version of the gigantic particle accelerators found at Fermilab and (very soon!) at CERN, among other locations. Leemans' group has achieved high-quality 1 GeV electron beams in a plasma channel based structure similar to an optical fiber (called a plasma capillary discharge waveguide, if you want to get all technical about it), and are now experimenting with the generation of intense terahertz and X-ray radiation.
And finally, here's a few more potentially useful nano-links for those seeking more information, courtesy of the Nanotechnology Project:
Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies
Managing the Effects of Nanotechnology (by J. Clarence Davies)
An inventory of nanotechnology consumer products
An inventory of nanotechnology impact research
Happy future exploring, and thanks for joining us in Cyberspace (if not at the meeting itself) .
Energy. There's never enough of it, at least in terms of our ability to harness it to produce useful work. And right at the center of our solar system, taunting us by being so near, and yet so far, is the Sun -- a big, powerful nuclear generator that produces enough nuclear reactions in a single day to pretty much meet any energy needs we could imagine well into the future. It's just so darned difficult to turn that raw solar energy into a kind of energy we can use.
That's why photovoltaics (solar cells, solar panels and similar technologies) is such an active area of research, attracting sharp minds like Paul Alivisatos, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the featured speakers at the 2006 Industrial Physics Forum. Such devices perform quite well in a laboratory setting, but the cost per unit and overall efficiency just don't scale up to sufficient performance levels to make them useful for anything more than select niche energy applications. After all, the US is a major energy hog: we need between 1 and 3 Terawatts of energy just to go about our daily lives. There is no solar technology currently in existence that can generate energy at that enormous scale while still being affordable and efficient.
What to do? If you're Alivisatos, you find a useful analogy in a jewelry store. Economically speaking, diamonds obey a fundamental scaling law that places constraints on what the buyer can afford: the bigger the diamond, the more it will cost. (We'll leave aside questions of quality, etc. for simplicity's sake.) So Alivisatos thought, instead of trying to make large crystals for solar cell applications, why not try to make them as small as possible instead? In fact, why not look to nanotechnology, specifically, colloidal nanocrystals?
Ten years ago, this wouldn't have been a viable solution, but Alivisatos pointed out that there have been many significant advances in our ablity not only to grow colloidal inorganic nanocrystals, but also to control their size, shape, and even branching (called interconnection), as well as their topology (they need to be hollow and nested to achieve the desired properties). Like most nanoscale materials, many of their unique properties are size dependent, but colloidal nanocrystals are also quite stable and can be processed in solution, just like polymers. Alivisatos thinks this makes them an attractive candidate for solar cell components.
He's working on a project (dubbed HELIOS) that seeks to turn solar energy into a usable transport fuel. It's brand new -- they submitted the proposal to DOE earlier this week -- but the concept is to convert photon energy into the energy found in the chemical bonds in gasoline. The goal is to go from the current dismal 1% efficiency of most solar cells to around 6% efficiency. There's some significant challenges, of course: it's really, really hard to control a material's properties and behavior at the nanoscale to a suitable level of precision. We've heard about solar's potential (and the pitalls) before, and it's true at the nanoscale as well: if those challenges can be met -- admittedly a substantial "if" -- nanoscale photovoltaic technology would combine very high efficiency with good scalability, making it a highly desirable energy source.
Alivisatos is interesting in building a type of hybrid solar cell out of the usual polymers paired with randomly oriented, self-assembling nanorods. Over the past few years, his research group has succeeded in controlling the growth of these nanosctructures to achieve very precise multiple branching, resulting in something that resembles a model of a carbon atom -- "tetrapods" of CdTe.
They've also managed to incorporate these nanostructures into hybrid solar cels to achieve a slight improvement in efficiency: currently around 3%. It's still far short of the target 6% efficiency, and Alivisatos admits his team is struggling with controlling material behavior at the crucial interfaces. But he believes they're on the right track, and that nanocrystal based solar cells will be a perfectly viable commercial technology in the future.
Richard Feynman arguably ranks pretty high when it comes to the Most Recognizable Physicists, surpassed only by Albert Einstein and (possibly) Stephen Hawking. He was brilliant, exuberant, colorful, and his interests extended beyond physics to art, theater, playing the bongos, strip clubs, and the remote country of Tuva. He's also one of the founding fathers of the field of nanotechnology.
Certainly he was among the earliest scientists to recognize the potential for exploiting the unusual physical effects that emerge at the nanoscale. He gave a famous lecture at Caltech in December 1959 called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," about what might be achieved if scientists could manipulate and control things on a very small scale. (You can read the full text here.) At the time, scientists had succeeded in creating a device capable of writing the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. Feynman realized this was just the beginning, the first paltry baby steps to a technological revolution. He thought it would one day be possible to write the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin; all one had to do was reduce the size of the text 25,000 times.
In 1997 Freeman Dyson wrote that "New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts." He has a valid point. At the time Feynman gave his prophetic lecture, scientists lacked the necessary instruments and manufacturing techniques to accomplish such a feat, but Feynman was confident they would be developed. And scientists have indeed made enormous strides in the miniaturization game. Apart from the ingenuity of the science, I think Feynman would have been highly amused by the nanoscale "Bucky Badger" mascot created by Robert Hamers, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
NanoBucky is made of tiny carbon nanofiber hairs, each measuring just 75 nm in diameter. I don't know how many fibers it takes to create a NanoBucky, but 9000 of the tiny mascots can fit on the head of a pin. Those nanofibers could be used to develop itty-bitty sensors capable of detecting chemical and biological agnts, or for energy storage in capacitors and lithium-ion batteries.
Why was Feynman so confident about his predictions? He realized that biology is teeming with examples of "writing" information on a very small scale. The human body contains billions of living cells, which store all the information eeded to coordinate all the functions of a complex organism. Cells are nature's nanomachines. That's why there's so much R&D devoted to engineering nanosystems that mimic nature's genius: we can create rudimentary nanoscale electronic devices, but they need to be much more robust and self-replicating if we are ever to realize their full potential.
That was the main point made by Michael Roukes, a professor of physics at Feynman's old stomping grounds, Caltech, who kicked off the Frontiers in Physics session with an overview of nanosystems of the future. "Nature's systems-nanotechnology still far outstrips what is engineerable today," he admitted, pointed to the profoundly robust and adaptive human immune system as an example. Our immune system provides what is essentially single-molecule sensitivity to invading pathogens: when pathogens are detected, information is conveyed by chemical "messengers," triggering an immune response to kill the interloper.
For Roukes, the living cell is a tiny integrated circuit/microprocessor, and single molecules can be viewed as living information "quanta." He'd like to exploit the cell's incredible sensitivity to detecting invading pathogens to create nanoscale biosensors (BioNEMS). The first step is being able to embed nanoscale biosensor arrays into microfluidic systems to form chip-based electronic "laboratories" for cell biology.
In his own way, Roukes is as much an optimist as Feynman when it comes to the inherent promise of cell-level nanosystems, particularly the potential for early disease detection, drug discovery and other basic research in medicine and biology that wold be possible if we had such a single-molecule sensor. "Ultimately, active nanobiotechnology will enable a detailed real-time window into the complexity of cellular processes," he said.
We're having a brief interlude here at the IPF blog while I wrap up a few remaining posts from the now-concluded Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco. But even if this blog has an end, nanotechnology research will continue. Fortunately, there's several nano-specific blogs out there you can check in on from time to time to stay abreast of the latest deadlines. (You can also find useful resources in the links provided in our sidebar, courtesy of AIP.) Obligatory caveat: bear in mind that the blogosphere, by definition, is opinionated. And the opinions expressed on the blogs listed below are not necessarily espoused by AIP or its member societies.
Nano-Public: A blog by Dietram Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin that tracks potential impacts of nanotechnology on society.
Nanotech Buzz: offers snippets of the latest hot stories in nanotechnology breakthroughs.
NanoBot: A nano-specific blog maintained by veteran journalist Harold Lovy.
Advanced Nanotechnology: A blog maintained by self-described "futurist" Brian Wang, who worked at the Foresight Institute for several years.
Responsible Nanotechnology: A blog maintained by Mike Treder, co-founder of the Center for Responsible nanotechnology.
Also, Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute maintains a nanotech-oriented blog.
And in case you have questions about the legal and regulatory aspects, there's even a blog called Nanotech Law.
Finally, it's not a blog, but University of California, San Diego physicist Ivan Schuller and his Not Too Serious Labs collaborator, Rich Wargo, have produced a TV-friendly video segment about the wonderful world of nanotechnology called When Things Get Small. Educators in particular might want to take a gander.
My wireless woes continued today, although with some marginal improvement: wireless service was available, it was just a bit slow and prone to cutting out altogether on occasion -- often just when I needed to save a blog post. I only bring it up because the unquestioned highlight of this afternoon's Frontiers in Physics session was a talk by MIT's Marin Soljacic on his proposed scheme for wireless non-radiative energy transfer. I expect it'll be on all the science news feeds by tomorrow morning, having generated quite a bit of excitement in the news media and scientific community alike.
It's still in the theoretical stages -- experimental verification is underway -- but if Soljacic's strategy turns out to be feasible, it might one day be possible to recharge our laptop computers, cell phones, and other indispensable electronic gadgets wirelessly, without having to lug around so many different kinds of chargers. (As someone whose cell phone died just two days ago as a result of charger failure, that day can't come soon enough.)
The critical word here is "non-radiative" -- that is, without the usual massive energy losses. Physicists know it's possible to transmit energy wirelessly, but over long distances, the waves dissipate too quickly for efficient transfer. That's the part that caused colleagues of session moderator M.T. Bernius (Dow Chemical) to email him exclaiming, "This is impossible! How can this be?!?" To his credit, Bernius respected the media embargo and declined to spill the beans. I won't go into excessive technical detail here; the work is described in a readily available preprint on arXiv, for those wishing more extensive detail. Suffice to say, it's an interesting idea with some practical potential applications. AIP will also be posting all the PowerPoint slides from the two days of presentations, including that of Soljacic, some time next week.
Soljacic says he got the idea from what has become a common item: a cell phone. His wife kept forgetting to recharge her Nokia cell phone, whose battery would emit a loud noise whenever it was running low -- often happening late at night or in the wee hours of the morning. Soljacic thought it might be nice if the cell phone could recharge itself, but to do so, one would need to transfer energy wirelessly with minimal energy loss.
He's not the first to think of it, as he readily admits. Famed 19th century Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla began constructing a giant radio station in Wardenclyffe, New York in 1901, financed by J.P. Morgan. It stood 187 feet high, capped by a 68-foot dome, and was supposed to be able to transmit radio signals without wires to any point of the globe. Tesla wasn't afraid to think big. Alas, the tower was never completed, because Tesla fell out with Morgan when the project ran way over budget and took much longer to build than originally anticipated. Wardenclyffe was razed in 1915 and its parts sold as scrap metal.
It looks like Soljacic's concept will fare quite a bit better. His insight is that the close-range induction that happens inside your basic transformer could potentially transfer energy over longer (short and mid-range) distances -- say, from one end of a room to the other A power transmitter would fill the space with a "non-radiative" EM field, and the energy would only be detected by gadgets designed to "resonate" with that field. Most of the energy not picked up by a receiver would be reabsorbed by the emitter.
Soljacic has a gift for memorable imagery: he held up one of his shoes by the laces during his presentation to demonstrate an object's response to excitation at just the right resonant frequency. He's also a big fan of Roomba, the popular robotic vacuum cleaner, and envisions a day when wireless energy could power not just industrial applications or electric vehicles (including helicopters!), but also freely roaming nanorobots, or macroscale robotic factory workers.
There were some obvious constraints to the basic idea, including available materials, extraneous environmental objects, and the like, but Soljacic and his colleagues played around with a few prototyoe designs and found a couple that would have limited range, but still performed well-enough at mid-range distances to conceivable rexharge a laptop or cellphone a few meters from the power source.
Of course, the basic underlying physics of Soljacic's scheme has been known for 200 years -- it's all about manipulating the physics of electromagnetic fields -- so why did it take so long for a scientist to think of doing this? Soljacic pointed out that new technologies usually emerge under two types of circumstances: when new physics is discovered that enables new applications or offers significant improvements to existing applications; and when society is finally ready to accept the new technologies. He thinks nonradiative wireless energy transfer falls into the latter category, since its development was dependent on the proliferation of cell phones, wireless Internet and other advances that have become essential aspects of modern life -- but only in the last 10 years or so.
Tesla, as always, was a man far, far ahead of his time. I'm rooting for Soljacic's scheme if only to confer some belated validation of Tesla's visionary genius 100 years ago.
A man stands at the front of a lecture hall with a container of talcum powder. He removes the cap, shakes the container a few times, and tiny particles of powder disperse visibly in the air. Then he invites members of the audience to inhale. Do you do take him up on that offer? Or do you decline, on the offchance that those aren't just talcum powder particles, but rather, something potentially more harmful?
According to Physics Today's Jim Dawson, this is one of Andrew Maynard's favorite visual demonstrations when he talks about the health risks and concerns potentially associated with nanoparticles. (If you have a subscription to the magazine, you can read Dawson's September 2006 article here. UPDATE: There was also a good article on Wired.com in October about a recent FDA conference on nanotechnology.) Maynard works for the Woodrow Wilson Institute, and while he didn't use this particular demonstration in this morning's talk on managing potential risk and protecting human health and the environment in the age of nanotechnology, the point it is intended to illustrate was front and center: namely, that we need to develop a nanotechnology oversight policy built on a firm scientific basis, to best protect ourselves from any potentially harmful impacts of nanotechnology without unnecessarily impeding further developments in this booming field.
It's easier said than done because of the sheer complexity and scope of the field: do we regulate consumer products like stain-resistant pants, shoe insoles containing nanoparticles, iPods, or giant magnetoresistant hard drives? How about food additives or novel water purification systems? Is it even possible to devise a general model or strategy for regulating this chaotic research area when it's so incredibly diverse?
Maynard seems to be saying. "Well, yes and no." On the one hand, he insists that any approach to nanotechnology oversight must be discussed within the context of specific applications. On the other, he does seem to think that some general principles can be stated that can then be extrapolated to the wide range of nanotech applications. For one thing, he thinks it possible to set a few boundaries for oversight along two basic criteria: oversight is needed for (1) nanomaterials capable of entering or interacting with the body in potentially harmful ways; and (2) nanomaterials which exhibit biological activity that is dependent on its nanostructure.
These two criteria incorporate such things as nanoparticles (aerosols, powders, suspensions and slurries), and also agglomerates or aggregates of nanoparticles that may (or may not) retain their unique small-scale structural properties even when grouped. Maynard is particularly concerned about the potential impact of unintentional use: a stain-resistant nanotech tie might be perfectly safe as a piece of apparel, but what if a toddler decides to start sucking on the tip of it? Does this enable nanoparticles to pass into the body?
Research into potential health and environmental risks of nanotechnology is still in the early stages, but Maynard was able to cite a few case studies involving lab rats. For instance, there is some compelling preliminary experimental evidence that nanoparticles of titanium oxide and barium sulfate -- which are normally quite chemically inert --can cause inflammation of the lungs in rats. There's also been some consumer concern about the use of nanoparticles in sunscreens and make-up: is it possible for tiny nanoparticles to penetrate the protective dermis of the skin? Experiments suggest that the skin is actually a pretty effective barrier. But Maynard cited a recent experiment involving quantum dots which suggests that altering the surface chemistry of the dots in very specific ways can increase the chances of penetration. His point: the size of nanoparticles isn't the only feature that matters when it comes to assessing potential health risks.
The truth is, there's so much that we just don't know about nanomaterials and how not just their size, but their structure, surface area, surface reactivity, and other properties influence both their behavior and impact. So how can we even begin to realistically assess risk and take responsible and appropriate action? Maynard sees promise in a model used by the pharmaceutical industry -- which frequently must assess potential risk on the basis of incomplete knowledge -- called "control banding." If it were possible to create an "exposure index" based on, say, the "dustiness" of a given nanoparticle and the amount used, as well as an "impact index" taking into account the bulk hazards, surface area, shape, size, and surface activity of that same nanoparticle, then these two indices could be plotted to provide some kind of objective assessment tool for determining potential risks.
Several audience members expressed skepticism regarding Maynard's suggested approach, on the rationale that no conceptual or qualitative approach can be successfully deployed in an area that -- by Maynard's own admission -- pretty much requires that risk assessments be made on a specific case-by-case basis. So the jury is still out on that front.
Maynard isn't the only person concerned with health risks, of course. He was followed by Michele Ostraat of DuPont, who described the Nanoparticle Occupational Safety and Health Consortium (NOSH), launched in 2004. DuPont is a founding member, as is Procter & Gamble, Dow, and Intel. Today, there over 16 companies and organizations worldwide participating in the consortium. Its purpose is to begin filling in the "knowledge gaps" via a collective effort.
There are numerous stated goals and "deliverables", most notably the performance of aerosol chamber experiments on silicon dioxide nanoparticles to determine things like the rate of particle diffusion and coagulation and the life cycle of the nanoparticles (i.e., how long do they pose a risk, if at all). That aspect of characterizing the aerosol behavior of a well-understood nanoparticle over time is nearing completion.
More challenging is the planned development of a portable air sampler device capable of detecting and measuring the presence of aerosol nanoparticles in the atmosphere. Such a device would need to be low cost, simple to operate, handheld (easily portable), and robust -- i.e., it must function not just in a controlled laboratory environment to detect carefully engineered nanoparticles, but also in the "real world," which most likely has a strong "background" of pre-existing airborne nanoparticles that will make reliable detection and measurement much more challenging.
About the only thing that is clear is that some assessment of potential risks should be undertaken -- because scientific research, particularly in the nanotech area, simply doesn't take place in a vacuum. By definition, it has a societal impact. We can take a lesson from history: the discovery of X-rays at the turn of the last century. X-rays found immediate application in medical imaging - indeed, the technology is still used today, with appropriate safeguards -- but initially users ignored early warnings that perhaps there were risks associated with this wondrous invisible form of ionizing radiation.
People embraced the new technology without fully understanding it. A dean at Vanderbilt University lost all his hair after sitting for a radiograph of his skull in February 1896, while a Scottish researcher who routinely used a fluoroscope to test the quality of X-rays by holding his hand between the tube and the fluorescent screen developed tumors and lost both his hands. And in 1904, Thomas Edison's assistant, Clarence Dally, died from over-exposure to X-rays -- carefully documenting his burns, serial amputations and diseased lymph nodes for posterity so that others need not suffer the same fate.
Hopefully history won't repeat itself when it comes to the nanotechnology revolution.
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
The above insight comes to us courtesy of Mark Twain, and was featured on the closing Power Point slide of Intel's Michael Mayberry, one of the featured speakers at the IPF session on emerging materials and devices beyond CMOS. Mayberry used it to drive home his main point: sometimes the most promising R&D in nanoelectronics isn't the more showy or exciting, but the more mundane and workmanlike.
Mayberry specifically compared the buzz over the potential for carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to revolutionize nanoelectronics with the prounounced lack of buzz over what he considers to be a more promising approach: developing nanomaterials that can be grown in place (via techniques like pattern-assisted self-assembly) on an existing substrate. Even though it's less sexy and exciting, and therefore generates far less "buzz," he believes that approach is much more likely to be easily integrated in future devices, which many of the session's speakers felt would probably be a hybrid CMOS/nano device -- at least initially. (Indeed, Mayberry is among the ranks of IT people who rightly point out that --if you want to get technical about it -- we're already doing nanoelectronics. Certain electronic components are in the nanorealm; for example, gate lengths currently measure 35 to 65 nanometers.)
That's because there are serious scale-up problems when it comes to manufacturing ICs out of CNTs. Take the example of copper nanowires, a promising component for future nanoelectronic devices. The manufacturing process consists of three steps: Surface Preparation, Deposit, and Patterning or Shaping. In contrast, CNTs require a much more complicated process: Grow, Purify, Deposit, Align, Integrate and Verify. Of those, achieving purity and exact alignment are the most difficult. It can be done in carefully controlled laboratory conditions at the small scale, but the techniques aren't nearly robust enough to scale up to the industrial levels needed to make CNTs truly viable for nanoelectronics in the near future. For that reason, Mayberry contends that the IT industry will tend to favor those applications with the fewest alignment requirements.
These and other challenges to scaling up CNT manufacture are well-known, and have been widely reported. Yet somehow those grim realities haven't done much to crush the excitement over CNTs' potential.
The Twain quote ended up resonating with me later in the session as well, during talks that focused primarily on the need for ever-more-precise metrology to characterize the unusual properties of materials at the nanoscale. There's a great deal of scientific ingenuity at work here, but it's decidedly nuts-and-bolts stuff: incremental improvements to existing surface microscopy techniques, for example, or the potential for extreme UV lithography, and occasionally a new emerging technique like chemical force microscopy. This type of work is so critical, particularly since alignment and control of materials at the atomic scale is what will ultimately make nanoelectronics a reality. It might not make for the most exciting headlines, but without dedicated folks willing to don the overalls and sweat over the tiniest details, innovation would be impossible. We tip our hats to them.
As mentioned in my very first post, nanotechnology is becoming big business. Mark Bunger, an analyst with Lux Research, kicked off the 2006 Industrial Physics Forum this morning by taking a look at the "Economics of Matter" -- namely, identifying the most successful business strategies for making money off of the continuing explosion of research advances in nanotechnology.
Bunger notes that the nanotechnology arena has shifted from being a primarily R&D enterprise dominated by scientists (the late Richard Smalley and Eric Drexler spring immediately to mind), to one that that is increasingly dominated by big business. Not only did President Bush specify nanotechnology as one of the top three areas for scientific research in his 2006 State of the Union address, so have the CEOs of powerful major corporations like GE, GM, and Procter and Gamble.
We're already seeing the first smattering of nano-products in the marketplace, but to keep their fingers on the pulse of innovation, corporate giants look not just to the cutting-edge research being done in academic circles, but also to exciting innovations under development at local start-ups. There's a distinct trend towards forming useful outside partnerships -- a practice Bunger dubs "open innovation." But how can your friendly neighborhood corporate giant -- or you, as a potential individual investor, for that matter -- determine which of the plethora of nanotech start-ups are likely to make the best potential business partners?
Lux Research has come to the rescue with a new report surveying 136 such startups and rating them according to how they scored (ranging from 1 to 25, for a total of 100 points) in four basic criteria: the scientific "pipeline", i.e., how active and robust an R&D program they have, evidenced by things like patents and publications; whether they have a product that is commercially viable; how well they've been able to navigate the minefield of legal and regulatory considerations; and how well they perform on standard measures of operations and finance. It's essentially the first quantitative measure developed to help identify the best potential companies for "open innovation" partnerships.
Take Nanomix as a example. Bunger reports that the company scored 21 points on the scientific pipeline, 20 on operations and finance, and 18 on how well they're dealing with legal and regulatory issues. Nanomix scored a more modest 12 on commercial viability, however, because they only have a few products on the market, or close to being commercialized. Total score: 71. That's still pretty respectable: only 26 of the 136 companies surveyed scored above 70.
While he stopped short of offering actual investment advice -- the Lux report is designed, after all, to identify potential partners only -- it was interesting to hear that Aspen Aerogels showed a 500% revenue growth from 2004 to 2006, and that Nanosphere just received an additional $57 million in funding that will enable it to go commercial with its products by next summer. And on the alternative energy front, Nanosolar just received some $100 million in funding to develop its flexible solar films, which are currently about 75% as efficient as traditional solar panels, at 10% of the cost. Those who follow solar technology know that the costs need to come down, and the scaling needs to go way up, before such technology is economically viable as an energy source. At least we know that nanotechnology can help (more on this topic in a later post).
I won't be investing my hard-earned cash any time soon. Technology start-ups are notoriously high-risk investments: huge potential returns if the start-up succeeds spectacularly, but far greater potential for devastating losses, especially for the smaller investor. It's just nice to see couple of Little Nanotech Companies That Could begin to realize some of their vast potential.
I'm getting off to a bit of a late blogging start today, thanks to the lack of readily available wireless service in the Moscone Center. Even my hotel only has wireless on the second floor meeting room area. I'm currently blogging from a nearby Starbucks, which at least is offering free samples of its new gingerbread latte. (A gratuitous bit of advice for all hotels and convention centers: wireless is no longer an optional service; for many of us, it's an absolute necessity. It's amost 2007, so get with the technological program already, or get left behind! Not that I'm bitter....)
It makes it even more difficult to find time to blog in between back-to-back scheduled sessions, which is too bad because the very first session this morning was chock-full of interesting talks. I'll just mention one of them here: the development of nanoscale dendrimers for targeted drug delivery to kill cancer cells. James Baker of the University of Michigan's Nanotech Institute for Medicine and Biological Sciences was on hand to describe his research group's proof-of-principle success in creating what he calls "molecular velcro": synthetic nanoparticles called dendrimers (or dendritic polymers) that are built up spherically layer by layer. They have proven highly effective as a targeted drug delivery mechanism to fight certain types of cancers.
Some folks might remember hearing about this breakthrough early last year. Baker and his colleagues essentially created a kind of "Trojan horse" that tricks cancer cells into absorbing the lethal (to the cancer cell, anyway) drug. Specifically, it exploits a peculiar feature of some cancer cells: they over-express their folate receptors, since they need lots of folic acid. The U-Michigan nanoparticles are designed to bind to the folate receptors, making it far more likely they will penetrate past the cell's natural protective barrier and release the therapeutic drug into the cell to kill it.
Experimental tests on lab mice showed that the targeted drug delivery was far more effective in killing cancer cells and diminishing tumors that the free-form injection of the same drug, with far fewer side effects. (Mice undergoing traditional chemotherapy typically die from the side effects, even though the therapy does imhibit tumor growth.)
There are some limitations. Different cancers have different biomarkers, so the folate-receptor target approach really only works with certain cancers. For instance, 90% of ovarian cancers over-express the folate receptor, compared to only 20% of lung cancers. Still, now that the proof of principle has been established, it's not hard to imagine a day when similar dendrimers could be made to target other biomarkers as well.
Another roadblock is possible toxicity. Those dendimers not absorbed by the cancer cells pass out of the body through the kidneys, in the urine. But the kidneys also have sections with especially high numbers of folate receptors, and may re-absorb some of the lethal folate-receptor-targeting drug, damaging the kidneys. There are still many more folate receptors in cancer cells, so chances are the risks are minimal, particularly when weighed against the benefits to be gained. But more tests will be performed to determine the exact levels of toxicity the human body can bear.
Ultimately, Baker would like to develop a therapeutic "smart cancer sensor," a single uber-nanoparticle that can pretty much do it all. First, it would target the affected site, bind to, and penetrate, cancer cells, and emit a telltale "signature" so doctors can tell where the cancer is located. Not only that, it would be able to measure the changes in the targeted cancer cells and select the appropriate therapeutic agent(s) based on those changes, then release the appropriate agent to kill the cancers. Lastly, it would be able to show doctors that the cancer cells were gone.
It's admittedly a tall order, but the progress to date has been encouraging enough to coax lots of much-needed funding, including $2.4 million from U-Michigan and $15 million from the National Cancer Institute. And yes, there's a spin-off start-up company dedicated to further developing the technology for eventual clinical use: Avidimer Therapeutic, in which Baker admits he has a significant financial investment. (How could he not? It is his technological nano-baby, after all.) Avidimer will need every penny of that funding to bring its fledgling product into actual clinical use: Baker estimates it will ultimately cost between $2.5 million to $4 million just to get things to the pre-clinical testing stage. The company has cleared most of the early regulatory hurdles, and Phase I trials are slated to being in August 2007.
The success of the U-Michigan/Avidimer technology inevitably raises the question of whether a similar approach might one day be employed to target other debilitating diseases, most notably Alzheimer's. One of the (many) reasons Alzheimer's is so difficult to treat is that it's difficult for drug molecules to penetrate the blood/brain barrier. It's one of the best protective mechanisms in the human body, but it also keeps out potentially helpful targeted drug therapies. Surely tiny nanoparticles might be able to penetrate it effectively?
Surprisingly, that's not the case, according to Baker -- at least not with their carefully tailored dendrimers. The only place the targeted drug didn't seem able to penetrate was the blood/brain barrier. There might be other nanoparticles developed in the future that prove capable of doing so, but to date, most such efforts have failed. Baker was also careful to emphasize that as ingenious and effective as his approach might be, nature is even smarter, and there's no telling what new ways cancer cells will find to take hold and proliferate in the human body in the future. We'll just have to keep one step ahead of it, I guess...
I've got to run back to the afternoon session on emerging materials and devices for nanoelectronics shortly. But stay tuned for more posts throughout the rest of the week, as blogging time (and Internet access) permits! As for Starbucks' new gingerbread latte: quite tasty, but the green tea latte still rules...
We're entering a brave new world in the 21st century, where makeup "defies" one's advancing years, "self-cleaning" windows shed dirt when it rains, wound dressings have built-in antibiotic and anti-inflammatory properties, composite building materials are stronger than ever before, and almost magical fabrics are being created for bulletproof vests, making them more flexible, yet stronger, with electrically conductive properties. On the horizon is toothpaste that automatically coats, protects, even rebuilds tooth enamel; electronics devices far smaller than even the tiniest CMOS technology; and maybe, someday, tiny robots capable of performing minor surgical procedures within the human body.
The key enabling factor in much of this is nanotechnology. Next week, "Nano Fever" hits the Bay Area full force in the form of the 2007 Industrial Physics Forum, an annual meeting sponsored by the American Institute of Physics. This year, the IPF takes place concurrently with the meeting of the American Vacuum Society. Its theme: nanotechnology in society and manufacturing.
That theme couldn't be more relevant, or timely. "Nanotechnology" is a broad umbrella term that describes any area of scientific research dealing with objects measured in nanometers (one billionth of a meter, the same size scale as individual atoms and molecules). At that scale, quantum effects hold sway, so materials have very different chemical and physical properties than they exhibit at larger scales -- which in turn can lead to some exciting and innovative new applications.
Some of those emerging applications are potentially very lucrative, and capable of revolutionizing our lives in unexpected ways. That's why nanotechnology has become big business, with private corporations pouring funds into nanotech-related research. And small wonder: The National Science Foundation estimates that nanotechnology could become a $1 trillion/year industry by 2015. The federal government is also investing heavily in nanotech R&D, most notably through the National Nanotechnology Initiative. Its growing prevalence has also sparked an ongoing debate about potential risks, societal impacts, and the need for well-established policies concerning nanotechnology.
But the real excitement of nanotechnology can still be found at the cutting edge of research. The IPF program will highlight the latest breakthroughs and prevailing issues across the broad spectrum of the nanotech enterprise. Keep watching this space all next week for breaking news about exciting new applications for nanoparticles, including their use in cancer diagnosis and treatment; an update on the challenges ahead for large-scale nano-manufacturing; recent progress on building nanoelectronic devices; and how nanotechnology can make cars more efficient, and help with environmental remediation.
Just to break up the straight session reportage, we'll also be featuring an occasional candid Daily Photo from the meeting; snippet bios of some of the people behind the nanotech revolution; occasional fun or informative links relating to nanotechnology; and complete coverage of the hugely popular "Frontiers in Physics" session that traditionally closes out the IPF conference. This year's topics include tabletop wakefield particle accelerators, neutron stars and black holes, and an early look at the latest breakthroughs in wireless non-radiative energy transfer, courtesy of Marin Soljacic of MIT.
In short, it's going to be an exciting and informative event, punctuated by all the colorful sights and sounds downtown San Francisco has to offer. Even if you can't be with us in person, I hope you tune in via the blogosphere!
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