Tiny materials and devices fight disease.

• Position: Nanomedicine - Brief article

As cancer maintains its standing as the second leading cause of death in the U.S., researchers have continued their quest for safer and more effective treatments. Among the most promising advances has been the rise of nanomedicine, the application of tiny materials and devices whose sizes are measured in the billionths of a meter to detect, diagnose, and treat disease.

Dean Ho, professor of oral biology and medicine at the UCLA School of Dentistry, and Edward Chow, assistant professor at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, describe the paths that nanotechnology-enabled therapies could take--and the regulatory and funding obstacles they could encounter--as they progress through safety and efficacy studies.

"Manufacturing, safety, and toxicity studies that will be accepted by the Food and Drug Administration before clinical studies are just some of the considerations that continue to be addressed by the nanomedicine field," says Chow.

Compared with other available therapies, nanomedicine has proven to be especially promising in fighting cancer. In preclinical...