The Dublin company has just entered a joint venture with Czech company El Marco. The new venture, called Nanopeutics, involves a manufacturing process based on nanotechnology. El Marco's machinery produces fabric woven from tiny strands of material called nanofibres, each of which is thousands of times thinner than a human hair.

Alltracel chief executive Tony Richardson said the pioneering technology would help it develop a range of products for use in hospitals and surgeries in the near future.

"We're aiming to deliver revenue out of this next year, " he said.

The company has developed a series of bandages and other medical products based around a patented technology called MDoc which helps to coagulate blood and stop wounds from bleeding.

It has developed a number of consumer products including plasters and bandages containing MDoc and sold through several pharmacy chains including Boots. The big money in the wound care sector though, according to Richardson, is in the professional segment of the market. Products used in hospitals and surgeries have to be manufactured to higher specifications but also carry much higher margins.

To justify price tags of up to $70 for a single surgical dressing, companies such as Alltracel have to bring something new to the table.

Richardson believes the Nanopeutics joint venture will do just that.

The advantage of using the minuscule nanofibres to manufacture bandages is that it enables Alltracel to produce extremely finely-woven dressings that maximise the surface area of the material in contact with the wound. Alltracel's plan is to develop a suite of products incorporating its MDoc ingredient with El Marco's nanotechnology.

For the doctors and surgeons who represent Alltracel's target market, Richardson hopes the unique properties of the nanofibre, combined with its MDoc technology, will prove a big selling point over rival products.

"The nanotechnology piqued most of their interest, " he said.

It is not surprising that Nanopeutics' planned use of the technology raised interest. It is an area of research which has generated a lot of hype but, as yet, comparatively few commercial applications. The bridge between exciting science and viable applications is still proving a wide one to cross. If Alltracel lives up to its promise it will be one of relatively few companies that have bridged the divide.

Nanotechnology . . . manipulating material at an almost infinitesimally small scale . . .

could have a host of useful applications in sectors ranging from pharmaceuticals to textiles. Nanofibres are already used in filtration systems, waterproof fabrics and certain types of car tyres.

The global market for nanomaterials is growing by a compound annual rate of over 30% and is expected to reach 23.4bn by 2008, according to a report by state development body Forfas.

Alltracel is hoping to extend that list of applications into wound care. The company is already in discussion with several of the large medical suppliers, a group which includes global giants such as Baxter Healthcare and Smith and Nephews.

The market for "professional wound care products" is worth up to $12bn a year according to Alltracel's estimates. Richardson said even one licensing deal in the professional sector would be a huge boon to the Dublin company.

"We don't need half a dozen customers for our business to be hugely successful. One might be enough."

While Alltracel has partnered with a Czech specialist, other Irish companies are exploring potentially lucrative uses for nanotechnology closer to home. The Tyndall Institute in Cork and Crann at Trinity College Dublin both house a range of early-stage nanotechnology companies exploring different applications. Three of the larger multinationals in Ireland . . . HP, Intel and IBM . . . are also funding research into nanotech.

Pharmaceutical company Elan, meanwhile, has developed a drug delivery technology based on nanocrystals or minute particles of a drug substance which can be administered to patients in a variety of forms.

Ntera, a spin-out from UCD, is working on technology which could one day rival the ubiquitous liquid crystal display (LCD) used in consumer electronics.

Ntera's technology charges minute crystals to produce high-resolution displays which, according to the company, consume significantly less energy than LCD and are easier to read. Earlier this year the Dublin company licensed its technology to a UK-based manufacturer, Salter, which incorporated it in two products: an electronic kitchen scales and a bathroom weighing scales.

Ntera co-founder David Corr, who has been instrumental in helping the company to raise 30m in funding to advance its research to the stage where it can be commercialised, sees the Salter deal as a breakthrough.

"Over the next couple of years we'll start seeing significant revenues from our products, " he said.

The company will focus first on numeric displays . . . relatively low-end screens used to display readouts on white goods such as washing machines and fridges. Ultimately, though, the grand vision is to develop the technology to the stage where it could be used on a large scale in high-end consumer goods such as widescreen televisions, laptops and electronic books.

"It's more complicated, so it will take us a bit longer, " Corr said, but he pointed out that the company has already held talks with several manufacturers about the possibility of deploying its technology in such products.

Although it has taken Ntera nine years to get its technology to market, Corr still describes it as "generation one" nanotechnology. To date, he said, most of the practical applications of the technology have involved manipulating a small number of materials at nanoscale.

"At some level, when you add enough materials together you get an application, " he said.

That research has yielded new materials including textiles, fabrics and crystals such as those developed by Ntera.

In essence, however, Corr describes this approach as "making an existing product in a different way".

Nanotechnology as it exists today has focused on material science . . . observing the behaviour of materials at a tiny scale and developing new materials and compounds.

The next generation of nanotechnology will yield more complex applications, said Corr.

The ultimate goal would be to create devices, such as microchips, at a nanoscale.

The tiny nanobots envisioned by futurologists and science fiction writers are still a long way off but one day they may trace their evolution back to surgical bandages and numerical displays on a bathroom weighing scales.