- Executive Summary
- Introduction: the role of the minuscule in medicine
- The rise of the tiny robots
- A closer look at the nanobot frontier
- What do experts make of these miniature helpers?
- Beyond tomorrow: what does a nanobot future look like?
- Learnings
Executive summary:
Advancements in healthcare are continuing apace with the arrival of nanobots. These tiny robots could make the treatment of chronic or serious illnesses a breeze by making invasive surgeries unnecessary in many instances. They could also allow medicine to be administered directly to the affected part of the body.
- Nanobots can be made from synthetic materials, biological materials, or a combination of both.
- While some nanobots will be controlled via tiny internal motors, others will be controlled externally with magnets.
- Researchers at a Hong Kong university investigating stroke therapies have increased the speed of blood clot dissolution by five to 20 times with nanobots.
- At Barcelona’s Institute for Research in Biomedicine, researchers have developed nanobots that can directly administer chemotherapy treatment for bladder cancer, achieving a 90% reduction in tumour volume.
- “The idea is for medical professionals to be able to carry out whole procedures that are non-invasive,” says Dr Daniel Ahmed, Professor at ETH Zürich.
Someday in the future, we may even have nanobots living inside us full-time, constantly monitoring for the first signs of illness at a cellular level. But this promising future might be a little while off: today’s nanobots are tested exclusively on mice. It may take a minute before they are approved for use in humans. So, while the future of healthcare may indeed be nanobots, don’t give up on diet and exercise regime just yet!
“The idea is for medical professionals to be able to carry out whole procedures that are non-invasive. We hope to be able to treat aggressive brain tumours, such as glioblastoma that can be hard to reach, without impacting the rest of the body.”
Dr Daniel Ahmed, Professor of Acoustic Robotics for Life Sciences and Healthcare, ETH Zürich
Introduction: the role of the minuscule in medicine
Do you ever stop to think about the progress we have made in treating illness? We have learned so much about the human body in this modern era: we’ve developed vaccines that have wiped out deadly diseases; created medications that allow us to manage chronic conditions like diabetes, and even normalised surgical procedures that would have seemed outright crazy just a century ago. Thanks to these breakthroughs, we now live significantly longer, healthier, and happier lives.
Despite these huge leaps forward, we still face countless challenges. Many diseases still lurk in the depths of our bodies, hidden away in hard-to-reach places. That’s why treating illnesses can be such a challenge: even with the most advanced medications, it’s often difficult to get the treatment to the right spot without affecting healthy cells along the way.
The rise of the tiny robots
Nanobots are nothing new for sci-fi fans, but advancements in the real world are picking up speed.
This might not be the first time that you’ve heard about medical nanobots. The truth is, the idea of using tiny robots to navigate the human body and fight disease has been around for decades – albeit largely confined to the realms of speculative fiction. While we’ve grown accustomed to implantable medical devices like pacemakers and artery stents, the dream of creating machines so small they could swim through our veins has remained out of our reach. That is, until now!
As you read this, scientists around the world are working on developing medical nanobots: microscopic machines that measure between one and 100 nanometers in size. To give you a better idea of just how small that is, the width of a human hair is between 80,000 and 100,000 nanometers. Even a red blood cell – one of the smallest structures in the human body – looks absolutely massive next to a nanobot. This means that they could travel through even the narrowest blood vessels in our bodies, reaching areas that traditional treatments simply cannot access unintrusively.
Nanobots can be made from synthetic materials, biological materials, or a combination of both. But how exactly do they move around once they are inside our bodies? Well, the answer can often be so rudimentary that you may be shocked: some are designed to be guided by magnets outside the body. While simple, this can allow doctors to steer them where they’re needed with impressive precision. Others are being developed with simple propulsion systems, using tiny motors or even the body’s own chemical reactions to navigate through blood vessels and tissues.
Promise and patience
It’s easy to imagine just how many applications these crazy machines could have. Instead of undergoing invasive surgery to clear a blocked artery, for example, you could just swallow a pill containing an army of nanobots programmed to break the blockage up from the inside. Pretty awesome, right? Well, what about a cancer treatment that doesn’t involve harsh chemotherapy drugs flooding your entire system, but instead a targeted delivery of medication straight to the tumour site?
Of course, it’s important to remember that this technology is very young. It might take a minute before they are safe for human use. Creating robots on such a minuscule scale is a monumental technical challenge and requires a level of engineering sophistication that pushes the limits of what’s currently possible. And then there’s safety: We need to ensure the materials used are safe for use in the human body so as to avoid unwanted side effects.
A closer look at the nanobot frontier
Researchers are already using nanobots to push at the frontiers of cancer treatments, stroke treatments, and more.
Taking on cancer, right at the source
While nanobot technology remains at an early stage, researchers have already been able to demonstrate a range of exciting use cases. Consider bladder cancer: a devastating illness responsible for more than 220,000 global deaths in 2022. The standard treatment involves surgically removing the tumour, and then following up with chemotherapy or immunotherapy drugs. Despite relatively good survival rates, the treatment is often not enough – there’s a 30-70% chance that the cancer will return within five years.
Nanobots could make a huge difference in defeating this pernicious disease. A team of researchers from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine Barcelona have developed self-propelled nanobots that can navigate through the bladder and administer treatment directly at the tumour site, significantly improving its overall effectiveness. To put their nanobots to the test, the researchers injected them into the bladders of mice with bladder cancer. The results were pretty mind-blowing: PET scans showed a 90% reduction in tumour volume. So let’s give it another five years – maybe we can hit 100%.
Making stroke treatment safer and more effective
Strokes are the second biggest cause of death worldwide, but maybe nanobot treatment can help out here too. Typically, strokes are treated with a drug called tPA, which is used to dissolve clots and restore normal blood flow in the patient’s brain. The problem with tPA, however, is that it has to be administered in really high doses to make sure enough of it reaches the blockage. This can lead to even more bleeding, including in sites outside the brain, such as the lungs and intestines.
To resolve this issue, a team of researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong have developed nanobots that can carry tPA directly to the site of the blockage and release their payload only once they reach the blood clot, preventing the drug from spreading through the rest of the body. That’s not all, however: early tests have shown that tPA-carrying nanobots were able to dissolve clots five to 20 times faster than the conventional treatment, even at much lower doses.
Magnetically-induced chemical reactions
Oral fungal infections can be a real pain – literally and figuratively. Typically caused by an overgrowth of Candida species, they can lead to a variety of uncomfortable, often painful symptoms. Traditional treatments involve antifungal medications and thorough dental cleanings, but these can be time-consuming and not always entirely effective. Many such infections come back within a matter of months, leading to a vicious cycle of infection and increasingly less effective treatments.
Now, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have come up with a novel approach that uses tiny robots to target and eliminate fungal infections in the mouth. The robots are made from iron oxide nanoparticles, which are magnetic, allowing dentists to control their movement and guide them directly to the site of the infection. Here’s where it gets interesting—when exposed to hydrogen peroxide, iron oxide starts producing oxygen-rich molecules that have a powerful antimicrobial effect, completely eradicating the infection in a matter of minutes.
“People envisioned the concept of a ‘magic bullet’ of targeted drug delivery more than 100 years ago, but it is with nanotechnology that we are now beginning to realize this vision in a very significant and substantial way.”
Omid Farokhzad, Professor of Anesthesiology, Harvard Medical School
What do experts make of these miniature helpers?
While optimism is a common sentiment, it is important to recognise how young the field of nanobots really is.
Let’s take a look at what medical experts think about the rise of nanobots. Unsurprisingly, a consensus seems to have formed that nanotechnology could have a transformative impact on how many illnesses are treated. “The idea is for medical professionals to be able to carry out whole procedures that are non-invasive,” explains Dr Daniel Ahmed, Professor of Acoustic Robotics for Life Sciences and Healthcare at ETH Zürich. “For example, we hope to be able to treat aggressive brain tumours, such as glioblastoma that can be hard to reach, without impacting the rest of the body, and to carry out procedures inside the body using microrobots that could prevent strokes.”
For some experts, the arrival of nanobots may solve a long-standing challenge in medicine. “People envisioned the concept of a ‘magic bullet’ of targeted drug delivery more than 100 years ago, but it is with nanotechnology that we are now beginning to realize this vision in a very significant and substantial way,” says Omid Farokhzad, Professor of Anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School. “In the next five, ten, or 15 years, we can expect to see much more advanced systems in the context of drugs, imaging, and diagnostics than we have today.”
To be sure, there is also a recognition of this promising technology’s tentative nature. “It is very exciting, but there will be lots of challenges. As we move away from mice we are planning to work with larger mammals,” adds Ahmed. “The regulations become much stricter [with larger mammals]. Then, when you move into humans, there is the question of whether people will accept the technology – but I think they will. Of course, we will have to study controls and take safety measures. Although I think this will be a disruptive technology, I also feel it’s a very safe technology.”
Beyond tomorrow: what does a nanobot future look like?
Tomorrow’s nanobots might be able to do more than treat existing conditions, but preempt illness before a symptom even presents.
So, from what we’ve seen so far, things look pretty promising for the future of nanobots. Experts have given them the thumbs up, and researchers are hard at work on promising use cases. But it’s important to remember that we are at stage one of this exciting journey into the future of medicine. Let’s use video games as a framing device: if the examples in this article represent the Space Invaders of nanobot technology, what might the industry’s GTA VI look like?
Well, it could mean having nanobots living inside your body as a constant friendly companion. Thirty years from now, you could have tiny robots continuously monitoring your body from the inside for early signs of disease. They could detect anomalies at the cellular level, many months before you experience a tangible symptom. From there, all a doctor would have to do is put in a request for targeted designer drugs to be administered – also via nanobots – to the target site. It wouldn’t be so much ‘back to normal’ as it would ‘like nothing even happened.’
The rise of nanobots could also enable a dramatic transformation in gene therapy – an area that medicine has long struggled with. Imagine programmable nanobots that could repair genetic mutations at the earliest possible stage. Or we could consider how they might enhance our neurological function by interacting with our nervous system to enhance the speed of cognitive functions like memory and learning. For those who struggle with their mental health, nanobots could intervene directly in our brain chemistry, balancing our neurochemical levels, and sending notifications to our smart devices if a potential crisis is around the corner.
Learnings
So, what’s the big takeaway here? Are nanobots the future of medical treatment? For many illnesses, the answer is very likely a resounding ‘yes.’ However, it is important to note that this technology remains very young. Nanobots are going to take a little while before they’re available for use in humans, and probably a little longer still before they penetrate the medical mainstream. In other words, get comfy, and don’t give up on diet and exercise as the first course of action just yet.
- Nanobots allow for targeted treatments of illnesses directly at the affected site, mitigating the possibility of unwanted whole-body side effects.
- Many experts, including Dr. Omid Farakhzan, have identified nanobots as the ‘magic bullet’ of targeted drug delivery.
- Some nanobots, like those tested by the University of Pennsylvania, are directed by magnets under the control of a doctor.
- One day, nanobots could live in our bodies full-time, continuously checking us for the first signs of disease.
- Nanobot trials remain at a very early stage: we have yet to go beyond mice into larger mammals of any kind.
With every promising development like nanobots, a range of challenges also emerge. How do you flush nanobots out of your system once they are no longer needed? Who is responsible if something goes wrong – the doctor or the manufacturer? And could these tiny robots be used maliciously: will our medical data be sold off to the highest bidder? It’s a brave new world out there, and we are just getting started on our journey into the nanobot future.
