Mar 25 2008
Wake Forest University’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials will host a gathering of scientists, engineers and medical researchers at a workshop that will explore both the science and the emerging business of nanomaterials used in medicine.
“Nanomaterials and Hyperthermia: Nanotechnology Approaches to Medicine” will be held April 6-9 at the Historic Brookstown Inn in Winston-Salem. “Hyperthermia” in this context refers to the use of heat to trigger the release of drugs being transported inside nanomaterials.
Speakers from Wake Forest University School of Medicine and research institutions as far away as New Zealand will attend the workshop. Presentations will cover such topics as the pharmacology of nanomaterials, heat transduction in nanoparticles, combining hyperthermia and mild hyperthermia with chemotherapies and extending hyperthermic therapies to noncancerous diseases.
“Unlike typical scientific forums, we will seek to understand the interplay between the needs of startup drug companies in the field of nanotechnology and the solutions that traditional drug developers have found for their own products,” David Carroll, professor of physics and director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials, said.
“In this way, we plan to create a forum that strikes the fine balance between technical innovations and developing regulatory approaches that will work for those innovations. To our knowledge, this will be the first workshop nationwide that is designed to understand the integration of therapeutic development and scientific innovation for an entire class of nanotherapeutics.”
The conference is co-sponsored by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, Wake Forest University and the Translational Science Institute of Wake Forest University Health Sciences.