Interdisciplinary work in nanotechnology: development of a retinal detachment treatment

R.D. ZYSLER

Córdoba

Conferencia; International Conference on Physics Education ICPE 2014; 2014

IUPAP - sección 14

Since the rise of nanoscience and nanotechnology in the last two decades on frequent occasions stated that this branch of science and technology has favored and has fed multidisciplinary interactions. While this type of work is generally desirable, it is not easy to accomplish given that each discipline has its own way of dealing with the problems, and taken to the extreme, individuals have ways of thinking and entirely different interests. This fact became worse when the disciplines are away from each other. Magnetic nanoparticles offer attractive possibilities in the area of applications in medicine, discipline in principle not close to physics. The magnetic nature of the nanoparticles allows the manipulation of them with an external magnetic field gradient which opens applications involving the transport and/or immobilization, for example, an anticancer drug, or a radionuclide atoms cohort. In addition, the magnetic nanoparticles can respond to a changing magnetic field in time, transferring energy from the field to the nanoparticle. Then, the particle can be used to heat the cells, as hyperthermia agents to target organs, such as tumors. This talk will present the development of a treatment for retinal detachment using magnetic nanoparticles. This is a disease of high incidence population (1 in 10,000 suffers it every year) that has not always a successful solution with the traditional methods. The presentation mentioned the evolution of a dissimilar multidisciplinary team, and how to get the understanding to achieve successful outcome.