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| Popular description Our bodies are made up of microscopic objects such as cells. These are miniature machines which are able to move, communicate with each other and carry out most of the important functions making our bodies work. These cells are in turn made up from different molecules small and large. Even the largest of these molecules is however too small to see, even down a light microscope, since they are smaller than light itself (today we can see them in other types of microscopes though). The cells making up our body live a relatively short time but make sure that the work is done jobs creating daughters and granddaughters. Most cells in our body cannot do this indefinitely are eventually age themselves long before we do. Fortunately nature has taken care of us and there are a type of cells called stem cells which are especially constructured to both continue dividing and generating daughters and to be able to change and alter themselves to become any cell in our bodies. These stems cells are a pool of cells which keep us healthy by healing and regenerating us as we grow older. We still know relatively little about stems cells but already see that we can use them to treat many diseases and disorders. In some cases the bodies own defences and repair mechanisms are not able to cope with a disease or disorder with modern technology to give a helping hand to the body for examples by giving antibiotics. Often this is successful, sometimes not. In some cases their remains damage to the body which is it not able to repair completely. One area where doctors think stem cells may be able to help in the future is in therapies to regenerate such damage. One example is Parkinson disease where death and damage of the cells in the brain leads to loss of control of the patients bodies. It seem likely that stem cells may allow regrowth of the nerve cells that make up the brain and hopefully in the future restored function. The treatment of this relatively rare disease may be one of the first diseases tackled by Stem Cell Therapies and open up the may for the many other diseases and disorders. One of the difficulties with stem cells arises from its great ability to become any other cell in the body. Stem cells are extremely sensitive to their surroundings and continually communicate with their neighbours. A current challenge is how to work with them without changing them and how to control them to allow them to be deliberately converted from one cell type to another. Within the NANOCUES project we will address this challenge. Our approach is to use technology from the forefront of modern materials research (for example from the electronics and biotechnology areas) to create artificially surfaces which the stems cells are able to recognize and communicate with. By this approach we will study how stem cells sense their surroundings and communicate with other cells increasing our knowledge. We hope that we will uncover new ways to give messages and cues to the stem cells allowing us to steer their behaviour. A measure of control over the stem cells in the test-tube will open up the potential to use them to treat disease in the body. Creating surfaces which can talk to stem cells is no easy task as the molecules that make up the cells are so small. We will need new engineering approaches that work on this lengthscale (the Nanometer lengthscale), for comparision the diameter of a human hair is typically 100 000 nanometers say 5000 times larger than the molecules we need to work with. Since the structures we build will be so small we will need new ways of characterising what we have made to be sure we have built what we wanted. Such new approaches and new tools which work on the nanometer scale are often called nanotechnology. Since we will need to work with biological components this then is called nanobiotechnology (or bionanotechnology!). An important part of all modern research is to consider ahead of time the risks and the benefits from a new technology to health and safety and to the environment, but also to the society at large. Where research has the potential for large risks or large impacts there is a need to take into account ethical issues. This is best done by open and balanced dialogue. Thus an important part of this project will be the interface with the rest of the world. There are 7 different universities from 6 different european countries (for more information go to the partner descriptions) involved in the project which is divided into 6 different sub projects/activities. Two of these sub projects focus on developing new nanoscale engineering approaches (new fabrication and new characterisation approaches respectively). Two other sub projects focus on studying the interaction of biological systems with surfaces, one of these focusing on studying just the molecules themselves and one focuses on studying how the larger cells react. Finally there is one sub project focusing on administration and one focusing on communication and exploitation. |
