"The field of medicine needs new constructs and strategies for treating disease," Mirkin said. "Many of the ways we treat disease are based on old methods and materials. Nanotechnology offers the ability to rapidly create new structures with properties that are very different from conventional forms of matter."

Mirkin is the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and professor of medicine, chemical and biological engineering, biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering. He is director of Northwestern's International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN).

Last year, Mirkin and Amy S. Paller, M.D., chair of dermatology and professor of pediatrics at Feinberg, were the first to demonstrate the use of commercial moisturizers to deliver gene regulation technology for skin cancer therapy. The drug, consisting of SNAs, penetrated the skin's layers and selectively targeted disease-causing genes while sparing normal genes.

"We now can go after a whole new set of diseases," Mirkin said. "Thanks to the Human Genome Project and all of the genomics research over the last two decades, we have an enormous number of known targets. And we can use the same tool for each, the spherical nucleic acid. We simply change the sequence to match the target gene. That's the power of gene regulation technology."

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