Bangalore, Mar 11, 2010: The immense potential of nanobiotechnology enables it to be at the forefront of a revolution in the field of biosciences. From enabling us to deliver engineered drugs to specific target tissues, and to filter even the smallest harmful particles out of the water supply; nanobiotechnology is certainly the future of biotechnology.

Speaking exclusively to BioSpectrum, Dr VK Tripathi, MD, Virtus Techno Innovations, Mumbai, India, termed nanobiotechnology as a disruptive technology. While citing reasons for using such a term to describe it, he said, “This is a very powerful technology that will revolutionize the entire industry, but at the same time, it will upset the entire $250 bn SPA industry because of the cost-effectiveness that comes with it. It will certainly lead to replacing conventional methods with more effective ones.”

Virtus is the first company in India to develop a formulation having a half life of three hours, slow release from intestine and non trace amounts of upto 53 nanomoles/liter. Thus it achieved 40,000 nanomoles/liter of blood of 'free resveratrol' in the independent human trials with its patented product. This is 1,000 times more than the other similar products available in the market.

Resveratrol is said to be one of the significant medical discoveries as it is crucial for the prevention and cure of cancer and is also used for anti-aging therapies. It has shown to prevent and cure a number of age-related diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's, heart diseases, diabetes, Huntington's, Parkinson's and Prion diseases. Generally, the free resveratrol in blood, administered intravenously is flushed out through liver in minutes with no significant half life. It is delivered intravenously or orally in trace amount with negligible half life. Even conjugates have a half life of 30 minutes.

“Our formulation is neither synthetic nor a plant extract and is free of heavy metals. We hence got a FDA manufacturing license as a nutrient product. Our excitement really rose because amongst large number of proven benefits of free resveratrol, one was that unlike chemotherapy, free resveratrol was toxic to cancer cells and protective/ rejuvenative to healthy cells, during in-vitro and in-vivo animal studies,” added Dr Tripathi.

As the big pharma and biotech companies have not been able to come up with any new blockbuster drug, and also with the increasing pressure to reduce R&D costs also adding to their woes, the nanotechnology is being looked upon as a savior of the industry in the long run. Nanobiotechnolgy also offers great opportunities in diagnostics, drug delivery and tissue engineering. It is projected to play a critical role in patient-specific therapy; however, this transition will depend heavily upon the evolutionary development of a systems' biology approach to clinical medicine-based upon technology analysis and integration.