The Israeli 'Technion' and The College of Judea and Samaria have developed a new nanobot that will be able to navigate inside the human body with external, wireless guidance!
In the last few years scientists have been making efforts to minimize robots so they will aid medical procedures: Robots are already involved in spinal surgeries today, and this new nanobot will hopefully be involved in new highly accurate medical procedures allowing minimal tissue damage.
The nanobot, developed by Professor Moshe Shoham of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, is only one millimeter in diameter and is equipped with small appendages allowing it to hold position in tubes of different diameters and against blood flow. Important to note is that those small blood vessels aren’t the only small tubules in the body, so it’s use might well be beyond that originally envisaged.
The nanobot receive power from an electromagnetic field created close to the patient's body, allowing it to operate for a long time.
These features will make it possible for it to venture through our veins and arteries in any direction in order to reach the right spot and conduct the relevant procedures.
So far, the University of Kyoto in Japan has a nanobot one centimeter in diameter (ten times the size of the Israeli one, and not practical for small blood vessels. Since this model is significantly larger than the Israeli one, it is less appropriate for use in our circulatory system and in other narrow passages in the human body.
The Israeli nanobot may have a wide variety of uses, such as focused medicine release useful in cancer treatment. Another major advantage is that it will be possible to activate several nanobots simultaneously, attending to multiple problems at the same time!
Although it has already been designed and built, the nanobot is far from being an operational model at this point.
More information on the development can be found on the Technion's website. Also, the actual robots in use today for prostate and spinal surgery don’t look anything like this:
Nano Cancer Fighters
Sangeeta Bhatia is an MIT biological engineer, and she gets to turn sci-fi into reality, developing nanoparticles programmed to make a beeline for cancer cells and release chemotherapy drugs nearby. This is another direction of research, as is carbon micro/nanotubules.
From one of her many interviews:
“How did you get into developing microscopic disease-fighters?
At MIT, I did my Ph.D. on how to use microfabrication tools--which had previously been used for building semiconductor chips--for tissue engineering to restore liver function. Then I got more broadly interested in the idea that there were all these ways to make tiny body parts using nanotechnology that people had developed for making paints and computers and things.
And now you make nanoparticles that vanquish cancer cells. How are they better than plain old chemo?
The particles have substances on their surfaces that make them home in on the cancer--one type contains a peptide that binds to proteins found in a tumor's vessel linings. This represents a new frontier in that you're taking the toxic chemotherapy cargo directly to the tumor, so you don't get the side effects of delivering a poison throughout the entire body.
When will this treatment be available to patients? Things like this take anywhere from five to 10 years to get FDA approval. In the meantime, we're also developing materials that can track what tumors are doing--whether they're becoming more invasive or getting ready to metastasize. We'd like to treat the cancer before it spreads.”
Also of note is that these nanoparticles can adhere to eachother and may well be usable to clot off the blood supply to tumors, and to cause the blood vessels supplying them to wither.
Additional reading: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/bhatia-biomedicine-au.html
http://fluidicmems.com/2010/12/07/129-sangeeta-bhatia-talks-at-mit-on-cooperative-nanosystems-for-cancer-diagnosis-and-therapy/