Nanomechanics and the study of human disease states

Subra Suresh

This lecture will deal with select topics at the intersections of nanotechnology, engineering, biology and human health. For this purpose, molecular changes induced by external factors or biochemical processes occurring naturally in the human body will be considered with a variety of state-of-the-art experimental and computational tools. The alterations to nanoscale responses of the whole cell, cell membrane and cytoskeleton will be explored using a variety of multi-scale probes and analyses. Attention will be focused on examples derived from applications of nanotechnology tools to the study of Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax malaria, several types of hereditary hemolytic disorders, and metastatic invasion of tumor. Case studies of targeted gene inactivation methods to probe specific molecular effects at the intersections of nanotechnology, engineering, biology and human health will also be presented. Multi-scale computational simulations will be presented with the aim of elucidating shape thermodynamics of healthy and pathological states of biological cells. Potential applications of these results for disease diagnostics, therapeutics and drug efficacy assays will also be explored.