Question: How do you control where the medicine-containing nanomolecules go in the body?

Philippa Bird answered on 25 Jun 2012:

Two ways:
1. By making them the right size – if you want to get them into a tumour you make them around 100 nm in size and they fit through holes in the blood vessels around the tumour, which the tumour has because it wants to steal all the good stuff from the blood.
2. By putting special coatings on them so they fit with “receptors” on the surface of cancer cells but not healthy cells, like the right key in a lock. As they go past they latch on to these receptors and that causes the cancer cell to take the nanoparticle inside itself. It’s really lucky that cancer cells have different receptors on them than healthy cells!