Research into the field of nanomedicine has grown and flourished in labs all over the world in the past few decades. Nanomedicine utilizes nanotechnology, a field which focuses on the manipulation of molecules and atoms on an atomic level, in the medical field. Researchers in nanomedicine are providing very promising research which many believe may be the key to ending many of the worlds most damaging and deadly diseases. Officially, nanomedicine is the “process of diagnosing, treating and preventing disease and traumatic injury, of relieving pain, and of preserving and improving human health, using molecular tools and molecular knowledge of the human body (Freitas, 2005, p.1).”  Nanomedicine has spurred global interest, and in the U.S. alone $849 million was spent on researching nanotechnology in FY 2004 (Freitas, 2005, p.1).  The graph below shows how more than half of the money spent annually on nanotechnology research is in its application in the field of medicine.

However, despite all of its promises, nanomedicine research and application is still in its infancy, and much is unknown about the possible medical and environmental dangers that this technology may harbor (Austin and Lim, 2008, p. 17217). Nanomedicine has great potential to provide medical science with the tools to heal but it also has the ability to cause damage. Due to is microscopic nature, it is extremely difficult to ascertain all of the complex micro-scale reactions that occur between the nanoparticles used in nanomedicine and the body.  Because of the extreme complexity of the process involved, research in bio-medicine necessitates the cooperation of researchers from a number of scientific fields, including biology, physics, mathematics, engineering and computer science (Freitas, 2005, p.1). As these researchers continue to explore the nano world and merge together their knowledge and research, it is the hope that in the near future nanomedicine will be able to offer an innovative, cost effective and noninvasive medical solution to a host of diseases and procedures.

Nanotechnology has been used effectively in several branches of medicine. As the body and its processes become more fully understood, researchers can design ways in which to use nanoparticles to interact with the body on a cellular level. Unlocking the secrets of the human body’s processes takes a great deal of time and research to accomplish. Great headway has been made in this endeavor by researchers of systems biology. Systems biology is integral to nanomedicine research and application. This research is seeking to uncover all of the elements of the bodies system, including the flow of information between these elements, in order to understand the whole. It is believed that when all of the systems are uncovered, they could be mapped and diagrammed. As such, when a doctor or physician detected deviations in the circuit, they would know that the system is not working properly and be able to pinpoint its source (Khushf, 2008, p.433). Uncovering the dynamics of how the body functions will allow researchers to design nanoparticles that can target key atomic and molecular interactions within the body to treat disease as quickly and effectively as possible. Systems biology takes a drastically different approach to disease from the current paradigm. Today, most doctors and researchers focus on therapies that are “based on empiricism with a fuzzy understanding of the basic disease processes and initiated without correcting the root cause of pathology (Khushf, 2008, p.434).” This practice is, in fact, not very scientific at all. Yet, due to the limitations involved in studying processes at an atomic level, it was the best that could be done at the time. Today’s research into nanotechnology, however, has the ability to surmount this hurdle and take science into a new era, one that  follows a biomedical model, allowing researchers to treat disease at its very root and not just the symptom level (Khushf, 2008, p.434).