Medical Device Link.

MDT 06 EVENT REVIEW

Dr. Leonard Fass, GE Healthcare

At the Micro- and Nanotechnology, Opportunities and Recent Developments Conference held alongside the exhibition on 16 February 2006, attendees heard an inspiring talk by Dr Leonard Fass, Director of Economic Relations, GE Healthcare. Nanotechnology is one of the building blocks of the future, he said, in his exciting exposé of health care in the coming decades. Nanotechnology will contribute to a wide range of diagnostic applications through, for example, the development of implantable diagnostic devices, internal and intracellular diagnostics and pathogen detection. Medical devices will become 500 times smaller; processing will be up to 100 times faster. Surgery will disappear in the next 20–30 years, he asserted, because it is better to have targeted treatment from the outside or radiotherapy from the inside and nanotechnology will make this possible. Hospitals in their current form will be obsolete and doctors will have to be trained differently; and with sensors in plasters to measure important physical changes our bathrooms will become laboratories in the home. Tissue engineering is likely to become the biggest market growing to be worth $350 million. It will be difficult for just one company to make the medical products of the future because a range of systems are required. How to successfully converge technologies and collaborate with systems suppliers is one of the biggest challenges for businesses.

The Conference was organised with the MNT Network and chaired by Julie Deacon, its Assistant Director. A range of micro- and nanotechnology developments were reviewed in the one-day programme. These included implantable wireless sensors systems, a novel biomaterial for use in brachytherapy that delivers nanocomposite dosage forms, and lab-on-a-chip systems.