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have employed nanoparticles in this way for MRIs, those tiny ob-
jects generate “around ten times more contrast than [traditional]
contrast agents.” 21
Nanoparticles have proven particularly effective in diagnosing
cancer. When someone has cancer, his or body contains thou-
sands of microscopic cancer-related proteins called biomarkers.
Nanoparticles made of gold and other materials have proven ex-
tremely sensitive to detecting those biomarkers and thereby diag-
nosing the kind of cancer present. When exposed to laser light,
those nanoparticles give off a distinctive signal that indicates they

Nanoparticles to Fight Infections

The antifungal medicine AmBisome is one of a growing number of nanopar-
ticle products presently in use in the medical community. Medical research-
ers hope that other medicines employing nanoparticles will emerge from lab
experiments and human trials in the near future. Among them are likely to
be medicines that can ght bacterial diseases as effectively as antibiotics
do. Several scienti c teams around the world have been working on such
drugs during the past decade and hope they will reach the market by the
mid-2020s. One of these nanomedicines is a treatment for the bacterial
disease shigellosis, which kills more than 100 million people globally each
year. When left untreated, it often leads to life-threatening diarrhea, septic
shock, and death. Sunil Shaunak, a medical researcher at London’s Imperial
College, has been attempting to nd a cure for shigellosis since 2012. He
states that from the start, he was well aware that a large arsenal of antibi-
otics, antivirals, and antifungals existed. Doctors had tried all of them, but
none had worked very effectively against the disease. As a result, he says,
shigellosis was still killing people. Shaunak and his colleagues decided to
try using nanoparticles, which they engineered to coat an invading bacte-
rium’s surface. Hopefully, that would attract the body’s immune cells, which
would then attack that deadly germ. This approach eventually worked with
rabbits in the lab. After the conclusion of extensive human trials, chances
are good that it will be used on people around the world.