Monitoring, diagnostic, and therapeutic technologies for nanoscale medicine.

The advent of medically-relevant technologies forged at the interface of life science and engineering will undoubtedly play a major role in shaping the next-generation of experimental as well as clinical medicine. This review will explore the development of a suite of platform modalities that can be employed towards medical diagnostics and therapeutics. Their specific relevance and impact towards cardiovascular medicine will be realized through biotic-abiotic coalescence, or the bridging of biological materials such as cells and proteins with non-biological materials such as polymers or solid-state devices. These modalities include: (1) Real-Time Cellular Interrogation Technology, which enables real-time investigation, or examination of cellular signal transduction and gene expression as a response to environmental conditions; (2) Diagnostic Devices, which include the fabrication of micro/nano sensors for the targeting of molecules indicative of cellular disorders; and (3) Therapeutics, or the engineering of membrane mimetics, or biomolecule-functionalized thin films as strategies for synthetic biological regenerative medicine, as well as therapeutically-active polymers as biocompatible coatings for implants, to name a few. These approaches collectively represent a universally-applicable, and comprehensive diagnostic-treatment strategy whereby cardiovascular disorders, or medical diseases in general can be diagnosed, monitored, and fundamentally understood to unprecedented levels. In turn, these conditions can be therapeutically addressed using drug-releasing nanostructured polymers with minimal intrusion upon normal cellular behavior, or biologically-active hybrid membrane devices based upon the interface of proteins with robust biomimetic polymers.