What inspired you to explore medicine at the nanoscale, and why now is it so promising?

What inspired me is the simple fact that life itself works at the nanoscale. When you zoom in far enough inside the body, you quickly reach structures that are only a few nanometres in size. For example, ribosomes, the molecular machines that make our proteins, are about 20 nanometers in size. To truly understand and treat disease, it makes sense to work at the same scale.

By designing materials at the nanoscale, we can directly interact with biological molecules that are damaged or malfunctioning. This allows us to detect disease earlier, repair or remove faulty components, and deliver drugs much more precisely. Nanomaterials can improve medical imaging by acting as powerful contrast agents, or serve as tiny capsules that carry medicines exactly where they are needed, using lower doses and reducing side effects.

Why now? Because two things came together. We have learned much more about how diseases work at the molecular level, and at the same time we have become far better at designing and controlling nanomaterials. Together, this makes nanoscale medicine especially promising, both for improving diagnosis and treatment.

Could nanoparticles finally make precision cancer treatment a reality for patients, and how close are we?

Nanoparticles will not solve the cancer challenge on their own, but they are already helping make treatments more precise. Today’s cancer care combines many approaches – traditional drugs such as chemotherapeutics, biological therapies like antibodies, genetic medicines such as mRNA, and even engineered immune cells. Nanoparticles have already been used as smart capsules helping these treatments reach the tumour more effectively.

We are moving toward treatments tailored to each patient. Doctors already test tumours for specific genetic changes, or for particular protein biomarker, and choose therapies that target those changes. Antibody drugs such as Herceptin have been successfully used in patients with breast cancer for over two decades and have significantly improved survival.

In many ways, precision cancer treatment is already happening. What is holding it back is not the science alone (although we still have a lot to learn), but cost, manufacturing scale, and having enough treatment options for different patients. We are close, but the next step is making these therapies more affordable, more adaptable, and available to more people.

Which recent breakthrough in nanomedicine has you most excited about diagnosing disease earlier than ever?

There are some new exciting blood tests that can provide amazing specificity of cancer detection. Together with AI analysis and contribution of AI to imaging and diagnosis, we will see huge advances in early diagnosis.

I am particularly excited about the growing understanding of what happens before cancer becomes detectable. We now know that cancer often develops in tissues that have been damaged over time. For example, work by my colleague Daniel Munoz Espin from the Early Cancer Institute has shown that aged or damaged cells can accumulate in tissues and actively promote cancer development. If we can detect these cells early, they could serve as warning signs, telling us that cancer risk is increasing even before a tumour forms.

At the same time, nanoparticle-based contrast agents and biosensors will help improve sensitivity of existing tests. We have seen how early detection tools like Pap smears and mammography save lives, and now new technologies could extend that success to many more cancers, which were previously difficult to detect early.

Why does the nanotech research matter for everyday healthcare this decade?

Nanotechnology has been an ‘invisible engine’ making 2020s medicine smarter and more precise. By pairing AI diagnostics with smart contrast agents, we will be able to light up diseased cells, catching illnesses years earlier.  And we have already seen the power of nano: the gold nanoparticles in lateral flow tests provide lab-grade sensitivity at home, while the lipid nanocarriers in mRNA vaccines proved we can deliver fragile genetic medicine safely to our cells. This decade, we are moving toward bio-inspired carriers that can navigate the body to target specific tissues, bringing more precision.

If the public remembers one big idea about the future of nanomedicine from your talk, what should it be?

The future is here already.