Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: Nanoscience
Victor Rodriguez - University of Central Florida
Co-Author(s): Thomas Woodson
Nanotechnology is one of the newest novel forms of technology and its uses can be observed in a growing number of products. Furthermore, it has only been 17 years since the USA launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative to promote STEM related research and development (R&D). This means that our knowledge of the implications of the research on a global scale is very limited. Our research focuses on a subset of nanotechnology, nanomedicine, and the direction of its research worldwide. We first gathered all the global clinical trials from ClinicalTrails.gov over a ten-year span from 2005-2014, and used five percent of the trials for each year, including all the nanomedicine related trials for analysis. There is not an exact way to collect nanomedicine clinical trials since no formal categorizing technique exists. To address this, we ran a search of keywords identified by Alan L. Porter to extract the nanomedicine clinical trials. Next, we used a metric called Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) to quantify each region overall disease burden and compared the regions DALY to the average DALY between Nano and non-Nano clinical trials. By applying a DALY, we can gain a better understanding of the types of diseases the field focuses on, and compare the R&D direction between Nano and non-Nano clinical trials. This study hopes to broaden the general understanding of the direction of nanomedicine research, and quantify if inequality exists in the R&D of nanomedicine.
Not SubmittedFunder Acknowledgement(s): NSF ; Stony Brook University
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Thomas Woodson, thomas.woodson@stonybrook.edu
Role: All parts of the research, except for developing original idea of project.