Fantastic Voyage - Nanotechnology

"To assess the degree of radiation damage, an astronaut would put on something like a pair of glasses, but those glasses peer inward onto the retina," Leary explains. "And you use the flowing of [fluorescent] nanoparticles on cells through the retina as sort of an in vivo assessment instrument." (In vivo means "within the organism.")

Related technology already exists - it's used to measure blood flow changes in the retina due to various diseases. NASA is interested in such non-invasive ways to monitor health because astronauts might need to act as their own doctors on extended missions.

Courtesy Yuri Lvov, Louisiana Tech University. In this illustration nanocapsule walls are partially dissolved, then allowed to reform, trapping fluorescent-tagged drug molecules inside. Such vessels can be made of self-assembling polymers or of semiconductor materials such as cadmium telluride.

"Eventually, astronauts might wear these glasses to sample what's going on in their bloodstream. And then if they need treatment, they have a hypodermic needle with the appropriate nanoparticles for the job," he says.

Nanoparticles are a radically new approach to biosensing and medicine delivery, and as such the technology will require many more years to become mature and dependable. But it's not a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. All the elements of this idea have already been demonstrated separately - the DNA-repair enzymes, the nanoparticles, the fluorescent tags. The trick is getting them all to work together reliably.

"This is a very difficult problem, and we're not going to be able to do it all in three years," which is the duration of the grant. "We're trying to do some pretty innovative science here - it's a bit of a jump," says Leary. "But that's why it's a lot of fun to work on."

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