Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as carriers of drugs and artificial blood capillaries

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs)

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are cylindrical molecules that consist of rolled-up sheets of single-layer carbon atoms (graphene). They can be single-walled (SWCNT) with a diameter measured to less than 1 nanometer (nm).

They are very lightweight, almost 1/6th of the steel with a mechanical tensile strength of almost 400 times that of steel.

Applications of Carbon nanotubes (CNTs)

CArbon Nanotubes can be used as carriers of drugs and antigens in the human body. The main applications of CNTs in pharmacy and medicine include drug, biomolecule, gene delivery to cells or organs, tissue regeneration, and biosensor diagnostics and analysis. Because carbon nanotubes have such a high surface area and they go into the cell by the millions, you can have a very high efficiency of delivery to a specific cell.

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Carbon Nanotubes can be made into artificial blood capillaries for an injured part of human body as they are promising drug delivery platforms that can be functionalized with a variety of biomolecules, such as antibodies, proteins, or DNA. CNTs can be used as drug carriers to treat tumours.

As per the article in NCBI, it is expected that this enabling technology would facilitate the making of nanodevices using these blood-compatible nanomaterials as building blocks for biomedical applications such as artificial implants, including structural tissue replacements, that is, artificial blood vessels, or functional devices such as drug delivery matrixes.

Carbon nanotubes are biodegradable.  As per the article in Science Direct, Bacteria, fungi and other multiple types of microbes have the ability to degrade carbon nanotubes (CNTs), graphene (GRA), and their derivatives and in the future more species with this ability will be found.