Advanced carbons in healthcare

Nanodiamonds and carbon nanotubes have the most established research base among advanced carbons in healthcare. Nanodiamonds offer strong biocompatibility, tuneable surface chemistry and useful optical properties from their nitrogen-vacancy centres, making them candidates for drug delivery, imaging agents and combined therapy and diagnostic platforms, with typical particle sizes of 4 to 6 nanometres. Carbon nanotubes are studied as drug carriers, as scaffold materials in tissue engineering and as elements in diagnostic biosensors.

Graphene and graphene oxide are applied as biosensor electrodes, neural implant coatings and cell scaffolds, with graphene field-effect biosensors offering label-free, real-time detection of glucose, proteins and pathogens at very low concentrations. Carbon fibre is valued in medical imaging for its radiolucency, and is the standard material in magnetic resonance imaging table tops, radiotherapy couches and C-arm accessories, which it keeps light without creating imaging artefacts. MXenes are emerging in flexible bioelectronics and biosensing.

The global nanodiamonds market was worth about $415 million in 2025, of which the healthcare and pharmaceutical segment made up roughly a third, or about $141 million, and the market is growing at around 11.9% a year to 2034. Graphene in biomedical and healthcare applications is forecast to grow far faster, at about 46.1% annually to 2031. More broadly, healthcare is the fastest-growing segment within a carbon nanomaterials market valued at about $2.2 billion in 2024.