- United venture with NEI for
nanotech applications plant
April 21, 2006
Express
News Service Kolkata, April 21: The country's first industrial-scale nanotechnology
project is to come up near Kolkata in the form of an export unit that will supply
cathode material for lithium ion batteries to buyers in South East Asia.
The Rs 6-crore project is being set up by United Nanotechnologies Pvt Ltd,
a unit of real estate major United Credit group, as a 50:50 venture with US research
outfit NEI Corp.
To begin with, the joint venture would manufacture
around 94,000kg of nano-materials.
Mr Shiva Prasad Bevinmarad, executive
director of United Nanotechnologies, said nanotechnology has almost unlimited
uses. It can make paints more corrosion proof, glass water-repellant, batteries
longer-lasting and smaller.
"Essentially, nanotechnology can improve
the effectiveness of a product," Mr Bevinmarad said.
Mr AC Chakrabortti,
a director, said research into nanotechnology has been going on for nearly 20
years now, but it has not made the jump to industrial-scale projects.
"The
Tatas, Mahindras, Maruti are all trying to get into nanotech and are spending
a lot of money, and we think there is a market in India," he said.
NEI
Group will not only provide the research and technology, but is also talking to
possible users in South East Asia.
Mr Bevinmarad said lithium batteries
made with nanotechnology do not show any loss in energy efficiency even after
thousands of recharges. Plus, such batteries would be smaller and lighter.
"Lithium
batteries are also finding applications in hybrid fuel vehicles," he said.
"We would be among the handful of companies in the world to have
such a production facility," he said.
The factory would initially
be 100% export-oriented, but would later make products for the domestic market
as well.
http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=179099
- Nanotechnology
may find disease before it starts
April 25, 2006
Columbus,(Ohio),
April 25: (EurekAlert): Nanotechnology may one day help physicians detect the
very earliest stages of serious diseases like cancer, a new study suggests.It
would do so by improving the quality of images produced by one of the most common
diagnostic tools used in doctors' offices - the ultrasound machine.
In laboratory
experiments on mice, scientists found that nano-sized particles injected into
the animals improved the resulting images. This study is one of the first reports
showing that ultrasound can detect these tiny particles when they are inside the
body, said Thomas Rosol, a study co-author and dean of the college of veterinary
medicine at Ohio State University. "Given their tiny size, nobody thought
it would be possible for ultrasound to detect nanoparticles," he said.
It
turns out that not only can ultrasound waves sense nanoparticles, but the particles
can brighten the resulting image. One day, those bright spots may indicate that
a few cells in the area may be on the verge of mutating and growing out of control.
"The long-term goal is to use this technology to improve our ability
to identify very early cancers and other diseases," said Jun Liu, a study
co-author and an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Ohio State University.
"We ultimately want to identify disease at its cellular level, at its very
earliest stage."
The study is in the current issue of the journal Physics
in Medicine and Biology.
The researchers injected a solution of silica
nanoparticles into the tail vein of each mouse. They then anesthetized the animals
and placed them on their backs on a warm imaging table.
Rosol said that
Liu and her team are working on creating biodegradable nanoparticles. For the
purposes of this study, however, the researchers wanted to use a hard substance,
silica, to see if their idea would work. The strongest ultrasound signals are
those produced by sound waves bounce off a hard surface. While not biodegradable,
the nanoparticles used in the study were biologically inert.
The researchers
took ultrasound images of the animals' livers every five minutes for 90 minutes
after the injection. The nanoparticles had accumulated in the animals' livers.
Another future step for this work is to label nanoparticles with a molecular road
map of sorts, which would direct the particles to go to specific locations in
the body.
"The liver takes up foreign substances in the body, so
it's not surprising that that's where we saw the particles," Rosol said.
"But we ultimately want to be able to make these particles to go to the mammary
glands or other tissues we're interested in."
The ultrasound images
grew brighter over the 90-minute period. The researchers compared these images
to those from a group of control mice injected with a saline solution. There was
no change in ultrasound image brightness in the control mice after that injection.
While this research is still in its infancy, Rosol and his colleagues
foresee a day when nanotechnology can alert a physician to the beginnings of cancer
or heart disease, perhaps in a woman who has a family history of breast cancer:
"Her doctor could inject the breast with nanoparticles and the resulting
ultrasound image would alert the doctor to any suspicious areas in the tissue,
even at the cellular level," Rosol said.
The hope is that combining
ultrasound and nanotechnology may provide a definitive diagnosis in lieu of an
invasive procedure like a biopsy."These nanoparticles may make it possible
for physicians to screen for tumors very quickly, and perhaps lessen the need
for a biopsy in many cases," Liu said.Nanoparticles are smaller than any
cell in the human body, so they may pass through the walls of the leaky blood
vessels, or capillaries, of tumor tissue and actually infiltrate the tumor.
"Until
now, nobody knew what these particles would do in the blood," Rosol said.
"But they made it into the liver.And despite their miniscule size, nanoparticles
are still big enough to carry a payload of medicine, Rosol said."That the
particles made it into the liver suggests that they could be used to deliver toxic
chemotherapeutic drugs that would act locally on a tissue, at the site of a tumor,
and not have such a pronounced affect on the rest of the body," Rosol said.
"The problem with chemotherapy is that the drug affects the whole body, causing
a host of problems such as hair loss, diarrhea and anemia."
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/008200604251440.htm
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