Oh this is very cool. Glad to see Bozhi's work getting some attention. A friend of mine is co-mentored by Bozhi and my graduate advisor, and was working on some very neat experiments using this technology to trigger specific responses in T-cells. Basically, the gold nanowires can be used to trigger a membrane voltage differential, and theoretically trigger a calcium flux and then a downstream immune response without an antigen. I know they had successes with nerve cells, and I'm hopeful the T-cell results will show similar success.
Edit: Properly reading the article, it looks like this is either slightly older work, or a different experiment from the one I'm familiar with, which did show success in nerve cells last time I saw the talk on it (and used gold, or gold-silicon, my memory is fuzzy now, nanowires).
My thought was immediately gone to using these nanowires to trigger excitatory bursts in localized areas of the brain, solving issues like microseizures (or possibly large scale seizures also) or performing extremely precise electrical therapy. However as the article says, these cells don't have the same transmembrane transport mechanisms (wrongly called phagocytosis by the article) they relied on so this would need more research, but the fact the wires can generate an electrical potential across the membrane is huge in itself and the rest can come.
However, the application of drug transport is also amazing. Currently a lot of research is performed on lipid transports (microbubbles, etc.) or capsule-like nanostructures to carry hydrophilic or oversized molecules across the cell membranes. Stimulation of membrane-mediated transport for any molecule just by attaching a chemically inert nanowire to them would be AMAZING.
Edit: Properly reading the article, it looks like this is either slightly older work, or a different experiment from the one I'm familiar with, which did show success in nerve cells last time I saw the talk on it (and used gold, or gold-silicon, my memory is fuzzy now, nanowires).