Nanotechnology: the next wave of commercial development for health and medical devices--an Australian story.

For the past two decades, nanotechnology has been the realm of the physicist and the surface chemist. Medicine has largely ignored nanotechnology as a specific field because medical research teams had worked with nanoscale structures for many years. However, over the last 5 years, a body of work has emerged in which materials scientists have become the drivers of a new group of medical technologies and products. These developments require an integration of disciplines that has rarely been achieved before and that has been problematic for many university-based research providers. When managed successfully, this integration provides the opportunity for significant benefits.