Guiding light in nanomedicine

Laser-guided drug delivery can achieve high spatial resolution compared with electroporation and sonoporation techniques. By tightly focusing ultrafast laser pulses, the cell damage area can be limited to submicron scale, allowing the removal of subcellular organelles or part of a cell membrane for drug delivery into a single cell. This function will play an important role in single-cell analysis. Combining with metallic nanoparticles conjugated with antibodies, a laser beam has been shown to be able to selectively kill tumor cells binding with these nanoparticles. Laser-guided drug delivery and surgery technology is expected to become a powerful tool in the nanomedicine field.