Porous Silicon Particles for Imaging and Therapy of Cancer

Porous Silicon Particles for Imaging and Therapy of Cancer 

Rita E. Serda, Cm Chiappini, Daniel Fine, Ennio Tasciotti and Mauro Ferrari 

Silicon technology is already established in terms of production, characterization and translation into nanotechnologies. An expansive set of miniaturized sensor and actuators have been developed that, in the biological context, could be used as building blocks for complex interacting systems [3-5]. Scalability, precision and reproducibility are characteristics of these processes that will be extremely valuable when translated into clinical applications. For these reasons, an enormous interest in the design and fabrication of silicon devices for biomedical application exists, and many research projects are now under way to characterize these systems within biological environments. 

Since the 1980s, silicon-based sensors and microelectromechanical devices (MEMS) have been used ex vivo for tasks such as pressure sensing, blood chemistry analysis, flow cytometry and electrophoresis [6]. The term BioMEMS was subsequently coined to describe the wide array of tools developed using silicon as a platform. Extremely sophisticated systems are now available, such as functionalized microcantilevers for molecule adsorption, recognition and quantification, as 

Nanomaterialsfor the Life Sciences Vol. 2 Nanostmctured Oxides. Edited by Challa S. S. R. Kumar Copyright 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH Co. KGaA, Weinheim ISBN 978-3-527-32152-0 

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