Contrasting to other medical technologies, nanomedicine is a novice owing to the fact that its evolution only burst out around the 20th-21th century. The biotechnology development in the 19th century was the beginning of nanotechnology, later the nanomedicine. After the invention of the microscope, it brought human the simultaneously evolution not only in chemistry, biology, and physic but also the foundation in microelectronics and molecular biology.
Even though the nanomedicine only started to grow for a few decades, however, the use of nanotechnology had been brought up by Albert Einstein and Max Planck in the 1900s.
For the first time, in 1920, structures with a nanoscale size were first detected under the ultramicroscope by Richard Zsigmondy and Henry Siedentopf (Krukemeyer, Krenn, Huebner & Resch, 2015).
Starting from then, many researchers had found ways to observe and understand closer to the cell structures and its function. Around the 1980s, due to the invention of scanning the tunneling microscope, an individual atom was shown vividly. With the new microscope, researchers and scientist were able to illustrate and control the nanoscale structure.
In 1959, the idea of developing and using nanotechnologies was mentioned for the first time by Richard Feynman, which later started the new interest for the scientist in the nanotechnology field.
Finally, in 1974, the term “nanotechnology” was ultimately defined by Norio Taniguchi and it has been used until today.
In 1999, Robert Freitas officially used the term nanomedicine as the title of his book to imply the use of nanotechnology in medicine based on the idea of Feynman. Later in the time, the National Cancer Institute launched the nanotechnology for cancer project in 2004. In the USA, FDA has approved for the nanomedicine since 1995, however, the approval reaches its peak around 2001-2005. Nanomedicine is considered as a newly developed technology in the medical field, however, the history of its foundation of biotechnology and nanotechnology first started in the early 19th century, quite long time ago.