Forty-five faculty, students and administrators represented Ohio University at the second annual Ohio Nanotechnology Summit in Columbus in early April.
The summit helped bridge the academic and commercial sides of nanoscience by bringing together about 480 representatives from businesses, universities, the military, and federal and state government. Ten Ohio universities were represented at the summit, and many set up booths to display their research. OU presented its new nanoscience/condensed matter/surface science booth for the first time, said NQPI director Arthur R. Smith.
About 90 percent of the student attendees entered their research in the summit’s poster contest. Of about 250 entrants from universities across Ohio, fifth year senior Violeta Iancu’s poster “Chlorophyll-a self-assembly: A low temperature STM investigation” was chosen as one of three top posters. Iancu said the poster was the product of months of research that made use of a scanning tunneling microscope to reveal the details of the carbon chain in the tail of cholorophyll-a right down to its specific atoms. According to the poster, the research shows chlorophyll-a might be a useful material for the construction of solar cells.
“With the scanning tunneling microscope, we can find out more about how the molecules self-assemble,” Iancu said.
Iancu’s research was sponsored by the Quantitative Biology Institute as well as the Department of Physics and Astronomy and illustrated the summit’s theme of bringing together researchers and industry representatives from different backgrounds.
“It was interesting to see that nanoscience problems appear in all sub-fields of science,” said Sergio Ulloa, a physics professor who was invited to participate in a panel entitled “Computation, IT, and Nanoscience.”
Industry and military representatives joined Ulloa on the panel, and he said he was impressed with their sense of the power of computers to model systems at the nanoscale.
Ulloa said he does a lot of his condensed-matter theoretical work with nothing more than pencil and paper, but sometimes there are too many variables and the system has to be modeled instead. Industry representatives like the idea of computer modeling because it helps them anticipate possible pitfalls of their products without spending much money. Both types of theoretical modeling are necessary, though, Ulloa said.
“Computational physics to me is like a tool that can let you take a look at phenomena from a new perspective,” he said. “If you used to drill holes with a mechanical drill and now you have a power drill, you still want to have a mechanical drill around.”
The Ohio Nanotechnology Summit aligns Ohio with the National Technology Initiative, which was launched by President Clinton in 2000. The initiative helps industry representatives and researchers to meet and discuss new ideas, according to a 2006 supplement to President Bush’s budget.
Small Times magazine rated Ohio the tenth most favorable state to nanotechnology development in 2004 and 2005, according to a summit release. Ten state universities were represented at the summit. The third Ohio Nanotechnology Summit will be held at Akron’s John S. Knight Convention center April 23-24, 2007.
Nanotechnology History
The summit came at a time when the number of commercial patents for nano-related innovations had surpassed the number of those given to university researchers, said Donald McConnell, Chief Operating Officer of the Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus.
According to the National Nanotechnology Initiative, innovations are considered “nanotechnology” if they satisfy three conditions: the research and technology is done in the one to 100-nanometer range, it creates and uses systems that have special properties because of that small size, and there is some ability to actually move the atoms of the system around.
At the California Institute of Technology in 1959, McConnell said, nanotechnology in its infancy was defined differently. McConnell discussed the vision of Richard Feynman, whose Nobel Prize-winning work in quantum physics at Caltech laid the foundation for technological advances that would not take off for another half-century. Feynman’s idea of nanotechnology was twofold, McConnell said: small machines that would replicate themselves and work in small areas on their own, and the ability to assemble materials atom by atom. The scientists and industry representatives discussed ideas that harkened back to both of these categories.
Medical Applications
Some of the small areas Feynman was talking about are inside our bodies. Scientists are taking advantage of special properties at the nanoscale to create technology that might be used by companies to make more effective, more efficient pharmaceutical drugs, said Mark Pagel, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland. Pagel is part of a research team studying a drug delivery system that uses nanoparticles to monitor the rate at which the drug is released. The system must allow the drug to be fully absorbed in the bloodstream and deliver it to the tissues and cells that need it, he said.
“Absorption into the body might take a few minutes, but elimination may take days,” Pagel said. “It can be a daunting challenge.”
A challenge faced by future patients as well as those who work with them in the laboratory is their toxicity, said Charles Geraci, who represented the National Institute of Occupational and Safety Hazards. By 2014, there will be trillions of dollars invested in nanotechnology nationwide, he said, and the process of educating industrial workers on how to deal with sometimes extremely reactive particles must begin soon.
“Nanoparticles often demonstrate much greater reactivity than larger particles of the same material,” he said. “We need to realize the benefits of nanotechnology while moving ahead with minimal risk.”
The problem of toxicity is one of many challenges in nanotechnology that require the insights of several disciplines. Pagel, for example, said his work is informed by cell biology, radiology and chemistry. He is part of the Biomedical Research and Technology Transfer Partnership Program at CWRU, which was established with support from the state government’s Third Frontier development program and is designed to hasten the development of nanoparticles used to view hard-to-reach corners of the human body and eradicate diseases those areas might harbor.
Nanoparticles are also being used to improve the accuracy of photodynamic therapy, a treatment that uses light and oxygen to kill malignant tumors, said Nancy Oleinick, a professor of radiation oncology and biochemistry at CWRU. In 2004, Oleinick and CWRU chemistry professor Malcolm Kenney developed a chemical compound known as Pc 4 that, when bombarded with red visible light in the presence of oxygen, burns away cancer cells. But in a clinical trial at University Hospitals in Cleveland, the researchers found that the promising process was still somewhat hit-or-miss, and they are looking at nanoparticles to help carry chemical dyes – such as Pc 4 – to the affected cells, Oleinick said.
“Ideally, a patient with a tumor would be injected with a photosensitive dye, and the tumor is then irradiated by a laser,” Oleinick said. “If you’re lucky, the photochemistry that ensues kills the tumor.”
Researchers are also studying ways to deliver nucleic acids to cells. This process is part of an emerging concept called gene therapy, where defective genes could be replaced by new ones. Unfortunately, nucleic acids are notorious for being difficult to deliver to cells, said Mark Cooper, senior vice president of science and medical affairs for Cleveland-based Copernicus Therapeutics.
“The only way in is through a 25-nanometer pore in the cell,” Cooper said. “There need to be condensing agents that will make the nucleic acids fit through the pore.”
Cooper said his company has studied the possibility of using nanotubes 8 nanometers in diameter to help deliver the nucleic acids. Nanotubes are molecular structures found in carbon and other atoms that are coveted for their extraordinary strength as well as their conductive properties.
Where do nanotubes come from? Some are naturally occurring and can be found in a variety of settings. Saber Hussain, a research toxicologist for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, said his research team came across nanotubes in hallicite clay. There are about 200 known applications these tubes have for industry, Hussain said. He is working on a study of the rates at which various chemicals that have been loaded into the tubes are released.
“One of the questions applicable to all industries is ‘how much material can we fill the tubes with, and what is the release profile afterward?’” Hussain said. “The key comes from knowing how materials behave differently at the nanoscale.”
OU also presented original research on nanotubes, Smith said, stressing that it was pure science research but may have technological applications in the future. An example of nanotube research at OU is the work of Dr. Liwei Chen of the chemistry and biochemistry department, who presented his work on carbon nanotubes at the summit. Dr. Alexander “Sasha” Govorov of the physics & astronomy department at OU also presented his work exploring the properties of cadmium telluride nanowires bio-conjugated with gold nanoparticles for light enhancement; such objects have potential applications as sensors, actuators, and photo-detectors.
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