Will nanotechnology soon allow you to 'swallow the doctor'?
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Story highlights
- Advancements in nanotechnology have created robots small enough to enter the human body
- Using magnets, they can be steered to the desired location to target diseases
- Clinical trials on human patients, targeting the eye, are about to begin
- Other potential uses include environmental cleanup operations, such as oil spills
(CNN)Imagine a swarm of microscopic robots, so tiny that a teaspoon can hold billions of them.
They
are ready to be injected into the most delicate areas of a human body
-- the heart and the brain -- to deliver drugs with extreme precision or
work like an army of nano surgeons, operating from within.
If it all sounds like science fiction, that's because it is: the plot of the 1966 sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage revolves largely around this concept.
In
the film, four people board a miniaturized submarine to enter the
bloodstream of an American scientist, left comatose by the Russians as a
result of a Cold War quarrel over the technology. They only have an
hour to remove a life-threatening blood clot before they return to full
size. The crew manage to escape the body in the nick of time via a
teardrop.
But reality has a way of catching up with our fantasies, and nanotechnology is yet another field of science that bears that promise.
At ETH Zurich,
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, mechanical engineer Brad
Nelson and his team have worked on nanobots for a decade, and are now
ready to think big: "We're making microscopic robots that are guided by
externally generated magnetic fields for use in the human body," he told
CNN.
A little knife
The
first to suggest that you could one day "swallow the surgeon" was
beloved physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. He coined the
idea in the provocative 1959 talk "There's plenty of room at the bottom", which is widely considered the first conceptual argument for nanotechnology.
"You
put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the
heart and 'looks' around," Feynman said, "It finds out which valve is
the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out."
Nelson's
microrobots might not yet have a little knife, but they sure have
something special: their shape is inspired by the common E.coli
bacteria, which is propelled by a rotating "tail" called the flagellum.
"Bacteria
have a rotary motor," he explains, "Now, we can't make that motor, we
don't have the technology for that, but we can use magnetism to move
these things, so we actually take these flagella and we magnetize them,
which allows them to swim."
The nanobots have already been tested "in vivo" in an extremely delicate environment, the eye. They can swim through the vitreous humor
-- the clear gel that fills the eyeball -- and deliver drugs in the
retinal area to treat age-related diseases such as macular degeneration,
which can cause blindness.
At the heart of the matter
The robots are made in a "clean room" environment to keep them sterile, much in the same way as computer chips.
Nelson
says that the test done with eyes have inspired other potential
applications, such as the treatment of heart conditions. In this case
the nanobots would be guided through a catheter - 2 to 3 millimeters in
diameter - to reach the specific part of tissue that needs to be
treated.
The catheter technique
could also be used to reach the brain, and other target area include the
smaller intestine and the urinary track. All difficult to reach areas
where precision is a must. For that very reason, nanotechnology has long
been touted as our best future weapon against cancer.
But how would surgeons operate with nanobots?
"They
would need training to learn how to use them," says Nelson, "but it's
kind of an intuitive interface, and the nanobots would be guided with a
joystick."
The technology is ready
for the first clinical tests on human patients, which will begin to take
place this year, according to Nelson.
Beyond medicine
"More
recently people in the field have been looking at other applications
like water treatment or environmental cleanup, where you might be able
to operate hundreds, thousands, millions of these devices and have them
swim through polluted water, catalyze pollutants, and then collect them
back," he says.
This could be
applied for example to oil spills: "There have been some recent
publications that have shown how they can actually attach to oil
droplets and move them to other locations."
But
the most outlandish prediction on the use of nanotechnology comes from
MIT's digital guru Nicholas Negroponte, who believes that in the future
we will receive information and knowledge directly from nanobots that
will swim up to our brain from within our bloodstream.
We'd love to hear what Richard Feynman would have had to say about "swallowing the teacher."
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