题目：纳米材料——提升我们的生活品质

      Nanomaterials – Improving the Quality of Life

主讲人：Prof. Harald. F. Krug [Empa - Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Switzerland]

报告摘要：

Nanotechnology is one of the promising technologies of the actual century. Starting with the possibility of manipulation of atoms ideas grow to create new materials on this atomic level with totally new properties. Such new properties should be used for the application of nanomaterials that change our daily life but also specifically the medical treatment. The most important arguments are saving of energy and resources, making processes more efficient, use of less critical (toxic) materials for daily life applications and the use of intelligent “smart” materials for personalised medicine.

With our competence to produce and include smallest material structures into devices or medical applications we strengthen the diagnostic and therapeutic capacity of such devices and increase the positive outcome of therapies and the sensitivity of diagnostic tools. Actually, nanomaterials, nanostructured surfaces and polymers or nanotechnology-based tools for diagnostics enhance the possibility in a huge variety of medical treatments. A simple and obvious example is the use of nano titanium dioxide and nano zinc oxide in sunscreens. These are very efficient absorbers/reflectors for UV-light and thus, protect the skin from DNA damage and the induction of skin cancer by UV radiation. This is not really a medical application but a precautionary measure for human health which additionally saves the environment from the burden with a multitude of chemicals which normally have to be used to absorb UV and to which aquatic organisms are subsequently exposed. Reviewing the actual literature one can find a huge number of examples in which nanoparticles or nanomaterials have been introduced into living organisms to enhance or recover body functions or to directly treat cancer.

Besides the use of nanoparticles for therapy or drug delivery more and more complex structures are investigated for their application in humans. These structures may consist out of solid metals or metal alloys (e.g. implants) or are made from polymers via various production processes (e.g. electrospun nanofibers).

Nanomedicine as a new interdisciplinary field is generally seen as an offshoot of nanotechnology by using concepts and the unique material characteristics obtained by decreasing material size at least in one dimension to the nanoscale, for medical applications. So far the number of applications is still limited. At Empa we envision to develop new nanocarrier and new nanomaterials based composites for biomedical applications. In such projects we are investigating the biocompatibility of such new materials and test them for their cytotoxicity and specific aspects of bioactivity.

Harald. F. Krug教授简介：

Harald F. Krug is member of the board of directors and head of the research focus area “Health&Performance“ at Empa (St. Gallen) in Switzerland. He is appointed as “Titularprofessor” at the University of Berne since August 2008. His work is focused on applications and implications of new materials, especially nanomaterials. Special emphasis lays on the development of new biological models and the establishing of reliable and valid methods for the testing of nanoparticles and nanomaterials. His work was awarded in 2006 with the cwi-Award of the German Ceramic Society and in 2007 with the Research Award for “Alternatives for Animal Testing“ of the State Parliament of Baden-Württemberg.

Until 2009 he was the speaker of the “NanoCare“ consortium (2006-2009) and actually his former lab is involved in 5 EU-funded projects as well as more than 10 further projects funded by different national and international funding agencies. Additionally, he is founder member of the International Alliance for Nano-EHS-Harmonization (IANH) which is engaged in the evaluation of methods for nanomaterials testing. He consults the ministries of three different European countries and is member of various advisory boards of international projects and well-known institutes.