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. 2017 Mar 29:4:1849543517701158.
doi: 10.1177/1849543517701158. eCollection 2017 Jan-Dec.

Improving health-care delivery in low-resource settings with nanotechnology: Challenges in multiple dimensions

James J Abbas  1 , Barbara Smith  1 , Mladen Poluta  2 , Adriana Velazquez-Berumen  3
Affiliations

Improving health-care delivery in low-resource settings with nanotechnology: Challenges in multiple dimensions

James J Abbas et al. Nanobiomedicine (Rij). .

Abstract

In the two decades after 1990, the rates of child and maternal mortality dropped by over 40% and 47%, respectively. Despite these improvements, which are in part due to increased access to medical technologies, profound health disparities exist. In 2015, a child born in a developing region is nearly eight times as likely to die before the age of 5 than one born in a developed region and developing regions accounted for nearly 99% of the maternal deaths. Recent developments in nanotechnology, however, have great potential to ameliorate these and other health disparities by providing new cost-effective solutions for diagnosis or treatment of a variety of medical conditions. Affordability is only one of the several challenges that will need to be met to translate new ideas into a medical product that addresses a global health need. This article aims to describe some of the other challenges that will be faced by nanotechnologists who seek to make an impact in low-resource settings across the globe.

Keywords: Nanotechnology; commercialization; global health; low-resource settings; medical device design; partnerships; task shifting; technology transfer.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Key design objectives in medical nanotechnology for low-resource settings. Although the most obvious design objectives are that the technology should meet an important clinical need and it should be affordable by those that would use it, there is a long list of other characteristics that are either necessary for, or would greatly increase the likelihood of, successful translation and widespread use in low-resource settings.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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