AIIMS hosts first Indo-US conference on nano engineering

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Friday hosted the first conference on Indo-US collaboration in nano engineering for developing a cost effective and accurate health treatment system in India.

According to the scientific communities that are part of the collaboration, nano engineering will allow improvement in the treatment of cancers, severe body infections, imaging, gene therapies and several others.

"This is a beginning of a long term collaboration. Due to the nano engineered products the treatment for serious diseases will be more accurate and better. In fact, the engineered nano-particles can be functionalised according to the requirement of the bio-medical applications during treatment, which was not possible earlier," said Amit Kumar Dinda, professor at Department of Pathology, AIIMS.

Emphasising that the nano particles will help in reducing the negative effect of chemotherapy, Dinda said cancer patients will benefit most from the new innovation.

The meeting was attended by officials of the health ministry, US universities and AIIMS.

Rupak K. Banerjee, professor, mechanical engineering at US-based University of Cincinnati said: "The project is in an initial stage but once completed it will highly benefit the medical system in India."

University of Cincinnati is one of the participants in the collaboration.

P.K. Jhulka, Dean Academics at AIIMS said: "The focus is also to make treatment more accurate as in many of the cancer cases, apart from the cancerous cells, other cells also get affected during treatment. This will be avoided under this technology."

"The proof of concept will be followed by pre-clinical and clinical trial making it acceptable to regulatory authorities before its clinical application," he said.