National Center for Design of
Biomimetic Nanoconductors

• Organization:
• Overview
• Research Network
• Nanomedicine
• Science Advisory Board

Nanomedicine

Nanomedicine, an offshoot of nanotechnology, refers to highly specific medical intervention at the molecular scale for curing disease or repairing damaged tissues, such as bone, muscle, or nerve. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, too small to be seen with a conventional lab microscope. It is at this size scale – about 100 nanometers or less – that biological molecules and structures inside living cells operate.

In 2005, as part of the NIH Roadmap's Nanomedicine initiative, the first four Nanomedicine Centers were funded to bring an engineering approach to the study of subcellular and cellular systems. National Eye Institute Director Dr. Paul Sieving said, "Future progress in medicine will depend on our understanding the complexity of biological systems. The NIH Roadmap, including the Nanomedicine Initiative, will advance our knowledge of biological systems. This will provide the scientific foundation for new strategies to diagnose, treat, and prevent disease."

The first four Nanomedicine Development Centers are...

1. The Center for Protein Folding Machinery at Baylor College of Medicine
2. The National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
3. Engineering Cellular Control: Synthetic Signaling and Motility Systems at the University of California, San Francisco
4. The NanoMedicine Center for Mechanical Biology at Columbia University in New York

Four more Nanomedicine Development Centers were announced in September 2006:

1. Nanomedicine Center for Nucleoprotein Machines
2. Phi29 DNA-Packaging Motor for Nanomedicine
3. The Center for Systemic Control of Cyto-Networks
4. NDC for the Optical Control of Biological Function

For much more information on Nanomedicine, you can spend hours viewing an introductory video course: Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine: Applications for Vision.

The National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors is funded by Grant Number PHS 2 PN2 EY016570B from the National Institutes of Health through the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research and is based at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Partner institutions include Yale University, University of Southern California, University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, Sandia National Laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory, Oxford University, Wabash College, University of California, Davis, nanoHUB at Purdue University, and the University of New Mexico.