From Fantastic Voyage to Star Trek'sSeven of Nine, the use of nanotechnology inside the human body has long been explored in science fiction. However, WIRED Health speaker Sonia Trigueros is working to make nanotechnology in healthcare a science fact.

Imagine a world without chemotherapy. Where cancer treatment consists of a pill that selectively targets and kills cancer cells without damaging healthy ones. She believes that world is within our reach, perhaps 20 years away.

Trigueros is co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Nanotechnology at the University of Oxford; she will speak at WIRED Health in the session A Nanoscale Approach to Cancer.

The purpose of her work -- using DNA molecules wrapped around single-walled carbon nanotubes -- is to create a highly efficient drug delivery system for use in the battlegrounds of cancer and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This use of nanoparticles in medicine could totally transform healthcare.

A molecular biologist, Trigueros works as part of an interdisciplinary team that includes chemists, physicists and engineers, all working towards creating new healthcare treatments through the use of nanotechnology.

"You are reading and learning from all the different methodologies," Trigueros says. "So you cannot stop learning." After eight years in the physics department she has had to learn a lot in order to speak the same scientific language as her colleagues.

But for Trigueros it's not just about collaboration. "It's about placing yourself out of your comfort zone," she says. "You have to be outside of your knowledge. You're collaborating with people but you have to know about their discipline. Because if not, it's going to be impossible."

Why? Because, she says, nanotechnology is a game-changer: "It is changing the way that we see science because it's impossible to do it in one discipline only."

When most people think about nanotechnology they think about making things smaller. However, for Trigueros that is not the most relevant aspect. She says the most relevant aspect is that when we use nanotechnology to make something smaller, the material changes and develops different properties: something light becomes heavier; metallics behave completely differently.

"What we have here is a new area of research," she says, "with completely new properties. And we only know about 10 percent of them. As soon as we know the basic properties of the materials the applications are millions. It's a new science."

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The nanotech revolution: Sonia Trigueros | WIRED Health preview