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Session: Technical Session VI

Nanomedicine and Nanoscale Delivery VI

Thursday, July 11, 2024
3:30 PM – 5:30 PM CET
Location: Sala Europa
Title: Plants need medicine too: opportunities and challenges for nanodelivery tools in agriculture

Description: For many agrochemicals, utilization efficiency hovers in the low single digits. The huge mass of material applied to fields worldwide as a result raises serious concerns about the sustainability of agricultural practices, especially as environmental stressors increase and the global population grows. Improving the efficacy of these actives by designing novel dosage forms that can both be easily administered and promote precision delivery to target tissues in plants is therefore highly desirable. To this end, formulating agrochemicals into nanocarriers is a growing area of interest, but there are several major obstacles that must be overcome: (1) cost limitations, to an extent that only global health researchers in this audience may have encountered before, (2) manufacturability at scales that eclipse typical pharmaceutical production, (3) a robust understanding of nanocarrier fate / transport / transformation / toxicity in plants (including the parts we eat), soil, water, pollinators, etc., and (4) tools to study the above. This talk will review these and give several examples of how tools from nanomedicine can be used to start making headway against these challenges.