The Nanotechnology Industries Association (NIA) is a fairly new organization formed in 2005 by a group of UK companies from a variety of industry sectors, including healthcare, chemicals, automotive, materials processing, and consumer products.

Based in Newcastle upon Tyne, the NIA offers a purely industry-led perspective derived from the views of the collective membership. This enables those seeking comment from industry to have one port of call and avoids the need to approach individual companies for statements on specific issues.

NIA Director Steffi Friedrichs spoke at this week's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Ideas Factory on the Software Control of Matter. Richard Jones, Director of this Idea Factory, said:

Steffi was looking well ahead of current commercialised applications in nanomaterials, to possible functional devices and integrated systems with applications in areas such as energy, healthcare and medicine, particularly, in the latter area, the ideas of the combination of nanoscale sensors and point-of-delivery synthesis which are implicit in the increasingly fashionable area of theranostics.