1. The Progression of Medicine
1. Conventional "modern" medicine
2. "Personalized" or "molecular" medicine
3. Nanomedicine "single-cell" medicine
2. How Conventional Medicine Works for Diagnosis of Disease
1. Identification of the "diseased state"
2. Simple measurements of body structure and function
3. Follow-up clinical tests
4. Internal examinations by non-invasive in-vivo imaging
5. Molecular tests for specific gene properties
6. Comparison of individual results with "normal ranges"
3. How Conventional Medicine Works for Treatment of Disease
1. Stabilization of patient – "heal thyself"
2. Surgical repair of injuries
3. Treatment with drugs locally
4. Treatment with drugs systemically
5. Treatment with targeted therapies
4. Factors Limiting the Progress of Medicine
1. Economics
2. Politics
5. Some Specific Problems with Conventional Medicine
1. Consequences of waiting for patient symptoms
2. Trained people and modern drugs are expensive
3. Diagnostic technologies, if available, are still relatively primitive and/or expensive
4. Crude targeting of drugs
6. Personalized Medicine
1. Based on genetic characteristics of the individual patient
2. Specific gene rearrangments or mutations
3. Specific SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms)
7. Nanomedicine
1. Medicine performed at single cell level
2. Possibility of "regenerative medicine"
3. Blurring of distinction between prevention and treatment

• Prow,T.W., Salazar, J.H., Rose, W.A., Smith, J.N., Reece, L.M., Fontenot, A.A., Wang, N.A., Lloyd, R.S., Leary, J.F. "Nanomedicine – nanoparticles, molecular biosensors and targeted gene/drug delivery for combined single-cell diagnostics and therapeutics" Proc. of SPIE 5318: 1-11, 2004.
• Moein Moghimi,SM, Hunter,AC, Murray, JC: Nanomedicine: current status and future prospects. FASEB J. 19: 311–330, 2005.
• Liu, H. Webster, TJ Nanomedicine for implants: A review of studies and necessary experimental tools. Biomaterials 28: 354–369, 2007.
• Ulrich Pison, U., Tobias Welte, T., Michael Giersig, M., David A. Groneberg, D.A. Nanomedicine for respiratory diseases. European Journal of Pharmacology 533: 341–350, 2006.
• Logothetidis S: Nanotechnology in Medicine: The Medicine of Tomorrow and Nanomedicine. HIPPOKRATIA 10(1): 7-21, 2006.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• James Leary (2007), "BME 695N Lecture 1: Need for New Perspectives on Medicine," https://nanohub.org/resources/3047.

1. biomedical engineering
2. course lecture
3. nanomedicine