[Intro Music]
[Applause]
Good afternoon. Courtesy of the Prime Minister's prizes in science,
I'm here today to talk about some recent innovations in nanotechnology
and to present some, uh, reasons why my old best friend forever, ["BFF"],
diamond is now emerging as a preferred candidate
for the next generation of tools in areas in biology and medicine.
Some of you may be wondering what we mean when we say nanotechnology.
Well, uh, very briefly, it's devices and capabilities that are based on discreet pieces of matter
roughly the same diameter as a strand of DNA. That's about a thousand times smaller than
a red blood cell, and about ten thousand times smaller
than a single strand of human hair.
What's a very big deal about the very, very small?
Well, ultimately nanotechnology is going to deliver
us a lot of interesting new capabilities,
but what we really want firstly, to make things cheaper,
to use much smaller quantities of our very rare
and expensive commodities. And this not just because
we all want cheaper gadgets in our home, I believe it's also
because it's important that nanotechnology doesn't become
another technology of the rich, out of the reach of third
world countries. We also want to make our existing devices
more efficient, yet while still maintaining the same function
and the same types of components. Increasing energy tech...
efficiency is a great example of this. And the last thing
we are all trying to achieve is to be able to do a range
of new things that we've never been able to do before, of course.
Now these nanotechnology futures, if you will, are likely
to have a big impact in a lot of areas, way too many
for me to go into today. So I'm just going to take a moment
later to talk about the last one, here on this very short list.
Researchers in all areas of science and engineering all around
the world are very, very active in this area, but the question
I get asked most, is when are we going to see a return
on all this investment? Well the truth is there are lots of products
entering the market all the time, but the mass influx,
that I think we are all hoping for, is unlikely to occur
because it takes time for us to make sure that the safest and most environmentally friendly
version of this new technology
is ultimately the one that reaches the shelves. But to give you
an idea of what's going on behind the scenes, I'll pull away
the curtain and I'm going to show you some recent results of my own
and my colleagues, science is very collaborative, on nanodiamond.
OK, so diamonds are made of carbon, irrespective of the size.
And the diamonds that are used in industry or those we see in stores,
have a very large, overall, surface area.
But most of those carbon atoms are actually located within the bulk,
or within the body of the diamond.
This means that the properties are dominated by the bulk,
and we see things like extreme hardness,
excellent thermal conductivity, good electrical insulation.
Nanodiamonds are different.
Now here we are looking at an elect... an image taken with
an electron microscope of real nanodiamonds,
scale there is 2 nanometres. So the dark patches are real
nanodiamonds, and you can probably see there stripes,
there are sort of linear planes there, those are actual
planes of carbon atoms. In an individual basis each of these
nanodiamonds has a small overall surface area, but the majority of its carbon atoms are located
on or near the surface. That means that the properties of nanodiamonds
are dominated by surface effects and of course are very big,
very different sorry, to big diamonds. If we zoom in and take
a look at a particular nanodiamond's surfaces we find that
actually some of those surfaces are not diamond like at all.
They are more like a fullerene, like a, like the soccer ball
shaped molecule I showed on my first slide. Those are shown
here in blue. The rest of the nanodiamond, the core
and the remaining surfaces are diamond like, they are shown
in yellow, and it's the mixture of the two that gives rise
to what we call anisotropy, and that anisotropy can be very,
very useful. Take for example the surface electrostatic potential,
this is just how the electrons are arranged on the surface,
but it determines how they interact with everything around
them including each other. And we find that there are positive,
or negative, or neutral patches, and that's not the case
in big diamonds. Now based on this, a lot of people think
positive and negative, they attract right?
Very true, and they attract in nanodiamond as well.
But we find that the preferred configurations are actually when
positive-neutral, or negative-neutral facets interact,
and we can calculate the probabilities of different types of patterns forming, and we
can also explain the amazing, long-range
self-assembly of these particles into linear chains,
and networks and fibers. Here are some fibers of nanodiamond
produced by my friend and colleague Eiji Osawa in Japan.
Now these are fibers of, oh, little five nanometre sized
diamonds all lined up. You'll note that the scale is a steel
ruler that you would find in a classroom, and some of these
fibers are over a centimetre long. That means there are
two million nanodiamonds all lined up along the length
of these fibers and they got that way on their own.
Try getting two million people to line up on their own.
So why is all this useful? Good question.
Well, uh, this tells us a couple of important things.
Firstly that we can use the natural size and shape
of nanodiamonds for uh, amazing applications without needing
to re-engineer them. It also means that we can use, ah, sorry,
we can manipulate the chemical and electronic properties using
existing technologies. So nanodiamonds, unlike a lot of other
nanoparticles, can be selectively, reliably controlled. They also
have another great advantage, or three more great advantages,
they're cheap, they're easy to produce and they're non-toxic.
This is an amazing resume for a nanoparticle.
And based on this amazing resume, nanodiamonds have gotten
themselves a new job in the area of cancer treatment,
so I'm going to just quickly run through that application.
So cancer cells contain, among other things, cancer specific
DNA which distinguishes them from other cells, and cancer
specific receptors. Now, scientists have been very diligent
in producing some biomarker molecules, which can identify
and interact with their receptors, specifically.
We have also developed chemotherapy drugs which intercalate,
or cut up the DNA and kill the cell indiscriminately.
So how do we get the two of these to work together?
Well, by combining both molecules with nanodiamonds which
have been functionalised with, or coated with oxygen
contain groups, we can actually get the two of them to be carried
together, so the drug is delivered the same time that the marker
is activated. This whole combination can be suspended in water.
And then used as an injectable therapy, or used as an active
layer in a patch type situation. This work is already underway
at Northwestern University by my colleague Professor Dean Ho,
and his group has already shown in mouse studies that when
combined with nanodiamond the drugs are more targeted
to cancer cells, as opposed to regular cells, that they need
around twenty times less drug to deliver the same treatment;
that the drug is delivered much more slowly than a burst release
at the start of a therapy that is typical of a chemotherapy;
and that they can deliver it over many months, over a lot longer
period of time which means that the need for repeated treatments
is reduced. Now when this technology comes out I think
we all know what this technology is going to mean.
Although I didn't have a lot of time to go into it today,
nanodiamond has another great advantage, they fluoresce
when they are exposed to certain LASER frequencies. This is great for all sorts of applications
in quantum computing,
or quantum information processing, but it's also great
for medical diagnostics. Shown here is a tumour cell and next
to it is, with an electron microscope image, next to it is a fluorescence image of the
The blue is a normal fluorescent dye and the green dots are actually
35 nanometre nanodiamonds all clustered around the cell.
So using, if we combine the optical properties with the chemical
and electronic properties, we may actually be able to see that
the drugs are being delivered where they are needed most.
Can you imagine that?
Well, thank-you very much for listening and I hope you agree
we are entering a diamond age of nanotechnology.
[Applause]
Captioning services provided by Michael Lockrey