Big Blue and Nano-Medicine Show Finding Functionality
April 16, 2011
Invigorated by a win on Jeopardy, IBM is now tackling nanomedicine.
What? Don’t these two disciplines seem related? A TV game show and nanomedicine with a built in finding function.
IBM’s recent breakthroughs in nanotechnology address a pressing problem: antibiotic- resistant pathogens. The advance is documented in Bloomberg’s “IBM’s Tiny Technology Rips Up Drug-Resistant Germ Cells in Early Research” and VentureBeat’s “IBM Researchers Create Nanomedicine to Kill bacteria where antibiotics fail.”
IBM, along with medical experts at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore, hope to give society a useful tool with “finding” and “targeting” functions. Their product, currently in a very early stage, will address two problems with antibiotics: bacterial adaptation and red blood cell destruction.
Antibiotics target DNA to keep bacteria from reproducing. They often leave survivors which develop a resistance to the drug. The biodegradable plastic nano particles are much more direct: they smash through bacterial cell walls. There’s no adapting to that.
The polymers that make up these particles are able to find and identify electrostatic ally their victims and destroy them without harming our cells.
About the process that is making this advance possible, VentureBeat reports:
[IBM researcher James] Hedrick said that decades of learning about chip materials has helped the team, which has worked on the problem at least five years, to figure out how to craft nano structures that can be injected directly into the body or applied to the skin.
All Jeopardy comments aside, we look forward to following the teams’ progress and, of course, IBM’s pulling together its various “finding” innovations into one coherent strategy. Does IBM look a lot like the pre break up Bell Labs or the Xerox PARC with many different research initiatives that may never find commercial success within the corporate environment? That’s a question for Watson or Lucene, depending on how one frames the question.
Cynthia Murrell April 16, 2011
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