Glimpses of the Medicine of Tomorrow

Wiesbaden, Germany, November 28, 2009 --(PR.com)-- As “Germany’s pharmacy”, Hessen possesses a strong chemical and pharmaceutical industry and a high-excellence research landscape. As a nanotechnology region it is in the vanguard of Europe. “It is our declared aim to make Hessen a leading nanotechnology location,” stated Klaus-Dieter Jaeger, Head of the Department of Scientific Promotion and Technology at Hessen’s Ministry of Economics, last Thursday at the opening ceremony for the 6th Nanotechnology Forum at the Congress Park Hanau. More than 250 participants had come to obtain glimpses of the medicine of tomorrow.

This year, it was possible to win Russia as a partner country. About twenty Russian scientists and entrepreneurs informed themselves about current developments and presented their results.

The purpose of the Forum is to boost the networking of nanotech users and suppliers in Hessen and beyond, and to help advance the commercialization of product and process developments. At the present time, about 150 companies and 80 research work groups are engaged in nanotechnology in Hessen alone.

According to Jaeger, “Medicine and pharmaceuticals are the fields in which we see the greatest potential for nanotechnology.” The age of “nanomedicine”, he claimed, could be said to have started once for all in January 2008, when authorization was granted for the first time to a medicament which had been optimized by nanotechnology. Even though nanoscale excipients had already been successfully used for decades, this new medicament marked a further stage of development. Thus nanotech developments from pharmaceutical research are now finding their way more and more frequently into clinical use. With the aid of nano-structured components, new medicaments can precisely target diseased cells and tissues. The advantages for patients are better possibilities for diagnosis, and therapies with fewer side effects.

Selected keynote talks during the course of the Forum offered an overall view of the importance of the nanosciences for medicine and pharmacy. In the exhibition “Marktplatz Nanotech”, which ran side by side with the talks, more than thirty companies, universities, institutes and networks presented their products, services and research projects.

The Aktionslinie Hessen-Nanotech (www.hessen-nanotech.de) is an economic promotion measure of the Hessian Ministry of Economics, Transport, Urban and Regional Development. Its purpose to network the eighty or so working groups engaged in the nanosciences in Hessen, the roughly 150 Hessian nanotechnology companies, and the nanotechnology users in industry and medium-sized companies in Hessen. At the same time, Hessen-Nanotech acts as a network node for other promising future fields in Hessen related to nanotechnology and materials technology, i.e. surface technology, microsystems technology and optical technology.

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