T
he past decades have seen robots become smaller and smaller, until in March last year this development moved past a long-standing frontier - robots became microscopic and thus viable for entry into the human body. Every field of medicine from oncology to paediatrics will be influenced when robotics becomes integrated with healthcare. May this be a technology to revolutionize medicine?
How could nanobots act on our body? One potential benefit of the medical nanobots is to reduce the severity of strokes,
which cause 32,000 deaths annually in the UK alone. Robots in our blood could navigate to an accumulated blood clot in the brain and ‘burrow’ through the clot, secreting enzymes to break apart the blockage and restore blood flow. Further, a recent study found that nanorobots injected into mice can starve tumours of their blood supply and hence fight off cancer. Here robots contain sheets of DNA wrapped around tumour-destroying enzymes, that bind with a protein only found in tumours. This technique has great potential because it targets cancerous cells without harming healthy tissue, avoiding the unpleasant or dangerous
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side effects associated with most cancer drugs currently available. No one knows yet exactly how consumer nanobots will appear but they might end up looking similar to bacteria that are of the same size. For example, a study published in 2017 looked at how navigation through the bloodstream could be achieved through rotating projections similar to bacterial flagellae. This would allow for highly targeted delivery of medical payloads in a minimally invasive procedure. Other techniques currently being explored include coating the robots with proteins and guiding them magnetically to an injury site, and even integrating
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