The Second International Conference on Nanotechnology at the Bio-Medical Interfaces, NANOBIO2012, was recently organized by the Amrita Centre for Nanosciences in Kochi.
The First International Conference was also organized at Amrita in 2009.
“In the past three years, both the field of nanosciences as well as our Amrita Centre have grown tremendously,” stated Center Director, Dr. Shantikumar V. Nair at the inauguration.
“Today Amrita is recognized as one of the top seven centers of excellence world-wide in the fields of medical bio-nanotechnology, ie the biomedical applications of nanotechnology,” he added.
“We have tried to build bridges between the disciplines of nanotechnology, medicine, cell biology and informatics to encourage research as per our Chancellor Amma’s vision,” stated Dr. Prem Nair, Medical Director, Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS).
AIMS and the Amrita Center for Nanosciences are co-located at the Amrita Health Sciences campus in Kochi.
The inauguration of the three-day conference was followed by several key note addresses.
Dr. Antonios G. Mikos from Rice University, USA first highlighted recent advances in nanotechnology that provided powerful tools to regenerate tissues.
Next Dr. Neil P. Desai, Vice President of Research and Development, Abraxis BioScience, Inc., USA delivered a talk titled Nanomedicine – From Bench to the Clinic and Beyond.
Additional keynote speakers included Dr. Cato Laurencin of the University of Connecticut Health Centre, USA and Dr. A. Surolia of National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi.
Dr. Anita Goel, CEO of Nanobiosym elaborated on opportunities and challenges for commercialization of nanobio materials. “The combination of physics, biomedicine and nanotechnology is definitely opening up new avenues,” declared the young physicist.
Distinguished scientists from IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, National Centre for Biological Sciences (Bangalore), Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (Kolkatta) and Indian Institute of Toxicology Research (Lucknow) also spoke.
Other plenary and invited speakers from Stanford University; Seoul National University, Korea; Monash University, Australia and University of Porto, Portugal addressed the delegates at the conference. These delegates included faculty members as well as masters and doctoral students from universities all over the world.
The delegates had the benefit of listening to talks by several of the Amrita faculty as well.
Dr. K. Manzoor spoke about the war against cancer being fought with nanoparticles. Dr. Deepthy Menon presented the toxicity studies of the nanomaterials developed at Amrita for cancer therapeutics.
Students presented some 200 posters in regenerative nano medicine and nanoengineering, cancer nanotechnology, nanosystems engineering for rational drug delivery, molecular medicine, molecular diagnostics, nanobiometerials and nanotoxicology.
“It was really an honor to have been part of such an enlightening experience. It’s quite a rarity to attend a conference where most talks are delivered by eminent personalities in the research field. I feel that NanoBio Conference should be organized every two years instead of three,” shared Rajasegaran E., PhD student at the Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore.
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February 28, 2012
Center for Nanosciences, Kochi
