Nanotechnology is being hailed as the next medical revolution, promising everything from precision drug delivery to real-time disease tracking. The same advancements that could wipe out chronic illnesses, however, also open the door to unprecedented biosecurity risks, says Paul Armstrong

The fifth anniversary of Covid-19 was a reminder of how fragile global health systems remain and how scientific breakthroughs can shift from life-saving to life-threatening in an instant. Nanotechnology is being hailed as the next medical revolution, promising everything from precision drug delivery to real-time disease tracking. The same advancements that could wipe out chronic illnesses, however, also open the door to unprecedented biosecurity risks.

Tech giants, from Google Deepmind to IBM’s quantum research division, are at the centre of this shift. AI is accelerating drug discovery at speeds once thought impossible, while quantum computing is designing molecules never seen in nature. The pharmaceutical industry is no longer just chemistry – it’s computational engineering. Are businesses, regulators, and society at large ready for a medical revolution that moves at the speed of software updates?

Targeted nanomedicine is already moving from concept to reality. Traditional drug treatments flood the body, affecting healthy and diseased cells alike. Nanotechnology eliminates that problem. Custom-designed nanoparticles can navigate through the bloodstream and deliver medication with surgical precision, hitting only the cells that need treatment. The result? Lower doses, fewer side effects and a radical shift in how diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and even viral infections are managed. Boehringer Ingelheim and co are betting big on big tech.

Google Deepmind’s Alphafold, the AI system that cracked the protein-folding problem, is providing scientists with the molecular blueprints needed for these breakthroughs. With AI predicting protein structures faster than any human researcher could,........

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