Biological and Non-biological Synthesis of Metallic Nanoparticles: Scope for Current Pharmaceutical Research

“Nano” is the prefix word originating from the Latin word ‘nanus’ meaning literally ‘dwarf’ and according to an International System of units (SI) it is used to indicate a reduction factor of 109 times. So nanosized materials are typically measured in terms of nanometers (1 nm is 10-9 m). Nanoscience can be defined as a study of the phenomenon and size reduction of materials at atomic or molecular scales. Pharmaceutical nanotechnology embraces applications of nanoscience to pharmacy as nanomaterial’s and as devices like drug delivery, diagnostics, imaging and biosensors. The term nanomedicine refers to the application of nanotechnology to diagnosis, monitoring, control and treatment of diseases. Biologists are embracing nanotechnology as the engineering and manipulation of entities in 1-100 nm range and exploiting its potential to develop new therapeutics and diagnostics. Due to the advent of many modern and advanced analytical tools and capabilities to measure particle size in nanometres, particulate drug delivery systems research and development has been moving from macro to nano. It is an extremely large field ranging from in vivo and in vitro diagnostics to therapy, including targeted delivery and regenerative medicine[1]. Nanostructured materials brought about by the creation of functional materials with desired physicochemical properties.