Monitoring, Diagnostic, and Therapeutic Technologies for Nanoscale Medicine

The advent of medically-relevant technologies forged at the interface of life science and engineering will undoubtedly play a major role in shaping the next-generation of experimental as well as clinical medicine. This review will explore the development of a suite of platform modalities that can be employed towards medical diagnostics and therapeutics. Their specific relevance and impact towards cardiovascular medicine will be realized through biotic–abiotic coalescence, or the bridging of biological materials such as cells and proteins with non-biological materials such as polymers or solid-state devices. These modalities include: (1) Real-Time Cellular Interrogation Technology, which enables real-time investigation, or examination of cellular signal transduction and gene expression as a response to environmental conditions; (2) Diagnostic Devices, which include the fabrication of micro/nano sensors for the targeting of molecules indicative of cellular disorders; and (3) Therapeutics, or the engineering of membrane mimetics, or biomolecule-functionalized thin films as strategies for synthetic biological regenerative medicine, as well as therapeutically-active polymers as biocompatible coatings for implants, to name a few. These approaches collectively represent a universally-applicable, and comprehensive diagnostic-treatment strategy whereby cardiovascular disorders, or medical diseases in general can be diagnosed, monitored, and fundamentally understood to unprecedented levels. In turn, these conditions can be therapeutically addressed using drug-releasing nanostructured polymers with minimal intrusion upon normal cellular behavior, or biologically-active hybrid membrane devices based upon the interface of proteins with robust biomimetic polymers.