Nanopharma

Although applications are being developed and have reached the market, nanopharmacy to date is generally still conceived as an emerging technology. Its concept is ill-defined. Nanopharmacy can also be construed as a converging technology, which combines features of multiple technologies, ranging from nanotechnology to medicine and ICT. It is still debated whether its features give rise to new ethical issues or that issues associated with nanopharma are merely an extension of existing issues in the underlying fields...

Medical practice is about to enter a new era focused on the nanoscale and the practice of nanomedicine, defined as the monitoring, control, construction, repair, defense, and improvement of human biologic systems via engineered nanodevices and nanomaterials. The potential impact of nanomedicine on society is expected to be huge as the nanopharma market grows significantly in the coming years. Given this backdrop, nanomedicine is poised to add a profound and complex set of ethical and societal questions. Some of these are recurring themes in bioethics while others will be discussed in slightly new ways due to nanomedicine's interdisciplinary nature: privacy, confidentiality, risks and benefits, defining disease, and enhancement...

Industrial renewal in the bio/nanopharma sector is important for the long term strength of the Australian economy and for the health of its citizens. A variety of factors, however, may have caused inadequate attention to focus on systematically promoting domestic generic and small biotechnology manufacturers in Australian health policy. Despite recent clarifications of 'springboarding' capacity in intellectual property legislation, federal government requirements for specific generic price reductions on market entry and the potential erosion of reference pricing through new F1 and F2 categories for the purposes of Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) assessments, do not appear to be coherently designed to sustainably position this industry sector in 'biologics,' nanotherapeutics and pharmacogenetics...