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L.A. startup is building tiny injectable robots to attack tumors
- bredren 6y agoI've had this vision of a set of tiny robots that live in your stomach and perform some amount of pre-processing of the foods you eat. They would do things like cut food into smaller pieces using small crab-like arms, digest and render inert sugars that are well beyond what your body needs and detect if you've eaten something that is rotten.
- tyingq 6y ago"digest and render inert sugars that are well beyond what your body needs" I wonder what the ethical discussion for that looks like, though I guess we already have Orlistat to flush out ingested fat.
- bredren 6y agoIt sure doesn't reflect well on self-restraint. One way to look at it is as taking the conveniences that promote "quality of life" further along the path toward some yet-to-be-determined limit. If people could eat and not only worry less about the consequences, but also experience less of the consequences the majority would. That said, these "stombots" wouldn't only be for people who want to eat double-ice cream sundays occasionally. If enough sugars could be broken down in the stomach--before they enter the blood stream, it could help manage type 2 diabetes upstream.
- InitialLastName 6y agoI'm not sure that "Our digestive systems are too inefficient" is the most important health problem to solve. If anything, in general our digestive systems appear to be too efficient to optimize the health outcomes of diets in the developed world.
- MisterBastahrd 6y agoOur digestive systems? They suck. Part of the problem of our intelligence is that we adapted our environments to us instead of the other way around. Cats can eat an all-meat diet. Dogs can do fine on rice and meat. Why? It's because their bodies produce the vitamins they need to survive. We created agriculture and had such rich diets that when we lost our ability to create certain vitamins in our own bodies, we never even noticed. The genes are still there, they're just broken. "Fixing" that issue would be one of the greatest feats in the history of humanity. If mankind ever wants to leave this rock and colonize other worlds, they better figure out how to fix that problem. Would suck to have a starship travelling for hundreds of years only to land on a planet suitable for colonization and realize you ran out of Vitamin C so everyone is going to die of scurvy.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoGuinea pigs also lost the ability to manufacture Vitamin C; it's hard to blame that on their development of agriculture. It's also not necessary to eat a rich diet to maintain levels of Vitamin C. Everything alive contains it. (Even the guinea pigs.) The things that suppress it are probably things you would associate with "rich food", like cooking and long storage periods. Eat one onion and you'll get far more Vitamin C than you need.
- wbc 6y agoAre you saying agriculture cause humans to lose the ability to create vitamins (specifically C)? I don't think that is true, at least according to Nature: https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-mystery-of-vitamin-c-14167861/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-mystery-of-vit... The article posits the loss of Vitamin C to be much earlier: Notably, not only all humans, but also gorillas, chimps, orangutans, and some monkeys have this inborn genetic flaw, meaning that the loss of vitamin C biosynthesis must have occurred first in one of our primate ancestors.
- ben_w 6y ago> Why? None of that. Cats are obligate carnivores, their bodies don’t produce taurine. And all animals need to eat something because none of us are photovores. And some plants are carnivores. If we colonise other worlds, rather than O’Neill habitats or mind uploads, we’re almost certainly taking the farms with us for the trip, not rely on local stuff.
- mhh__ 6y agoThis is something I wonder about quite a lot. If we had a way of eating food but knowing it was basically just culinary masturbation so to speak (i.e. no nutrients beyond what is safe or thin), would we still eat like we do - I'm not particularly prone to comfort eating, but the psychology behind these things is fascinating and I would wager the answer is probably no (and would probably be deeply immoral given that some people starve)
- lowdanie 6y agoIn some sense you have described our microbiome :)
- jvanderbot 6y agoI recall seeing early trials on horse / pigs cadavers at a robotics conf. The robot is actuated / steered externally using a closed-loop MRI imager and magnetic field steering. So, the "robot" isn't exactly miniature if you count all that. Just the end effector, which is a small blob of metal and plasticy stuff. Still, really cool.
- dehrmann 6y agoSounds a bit like a magnetic mixer you see in a lab.
- mhh__ 6y agoI'm surprised you can't get them for the kitchen. I guess the torque is probably crap, but still.
- djrogers 6y agoYou can - look for a hot chocolate mixing mug or magnetic mixing mug on {large retail site}. Gave my son one for Christmas a few years ago cuz he's a nerd like me and adores hot chocolate. He loves the thing!
- pengaru 6y agoIs that the same as a frother? I've seen a streamer use one on-stream a few times for making frothed chai tea, and it uses a magnetic coupler...
- tomjakubowski 6y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Lab-Stirrers/b?ie=UTF8&node=318023011 https://www.amazon.com/Lab-Stirrers/b?ie=UTF8&node=318023011
- delecti 6y agoYeah, I think most "solutions" in the kitchen are far too concentrated. I wouldn't expect a stirring bar to do much for stirring dough or any but the thinnest batters.
- tyingq 6y agoRobots seems like the wrong word, which seems a comfort in the this case. They mention that both moving it around, and activating the plunger is done via magnetic fields from outside the body. It actually sounds relatively "low tech", which perhaps means faster to approval.
- iancmceachern 6y agoThey're really just "objects". The real robot is the thing outside the body controlling the "objects".
- greesil 6y agoAn object killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Sometimes it helps to have a sense of scale on how things are worded. Also, marketing.
- coldcode 6y agoStar Trek called them nanites.
- ajmurmann 6y agoNanites are tiny robots though and not moved by outside forces like the thing described by the article.
- andi999 6y agoI like the ones needing outside forces much better.
- reaperducer 6y agoAs did Mystery Science Theater 3000. I wonder if it's a more generic term than I realized. https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/The_Nanites https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/The_Nanites
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- endisneigh 6y agoIf the robots are small enough isn’t this just going back to pharmacology? What’s the difference between a sufficiently tiny robot and a protein?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoControl, as discussed in the article. You have to distribute a protein via diffusion through the blood. You can't drive it to the site of a tumor. Also, the robots are not that small.
- Grustaf 6y agoIt would be cool if you had magnetic proteins that you could steer. Or at least magnetically control the release of the medicine.
- iamben 6y agoRobots really seems the wrong word here, after reading about the magnets. Especially with the whole anti-vaxxers "Bill Gates is injecting nanobots in my Covid vaccine" rubbish that's perpetually doing the rounds on social media of late. Edit: it's very cool though!
- efficax 6y agoWhat could go wrong
- thereisnospork 6y agoWhen the alternative is terminal cancer not much.
- space_ghost 6y agoIt didn't go well on that episode of The Outer Limits. John-Boy Walton grew eyes in the back of his head.
- D-Coder 6y agoThat sounds like a plus. :-)
- mnemotronic 6y agoAnd the globalist conspiracy theory websites go crazy...
- vmception 6y agoI've been approaching this wrong, is that a profitable audience? It seems like a fairly easy funnel since almost everyone is susceptible.
- Grustaf 6y agoThese are quite large though, why wouldn’t it work with say a long needle instead? I was imagining these robots to be small as cells!
- topynate 6y agoInteresting that the size of the devices is limited by imaging technology rather than the ability to fabricate smaller ones. I guess the trade-off is that imaging small things with X-rays requires more ionizing radiation.
- fumar 6y agoI lost my sister to a glioma a few years back. I've always known that eventually better treatments would become available, but this is novel and not something I envisioned. I hope it works and saves children who have these brain tumors.
- AhmadIbrahim 6y agoMy condolences
- joedevon 6y agoMy condolences :(
- Marciplan 6y ago:( sorry
- madmadjo 6y agoMy condolences... :(
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/QzHCi https://archive.is/QzHCi
- social_quotient 6y agoGosh this reminds me of Innerspace (1987) https://youtu.be/7kQDIosuZuo https://youtu.be/7kQDIosuZuo
- not_a_bot_ 6y agoIt reminded me of this: https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Breed https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Breed
- jfrunyon 6y agoClearly someone didn't read enough science fiction to know injectable robots ALWAYS ends up destroying the world. I sure hope this works!
- Vadoff 6y agoIf those robots were self-replicating, maybe.
- thesz 6y agoHow will these robots be ejected from the body (see note below) and what other application they may have? I look for most sinister applications possible, disguised as beneficial. Asking for a friend, of course. Note that human immune system cannot properly dispose particles above some diameter. This is the reason for silicosis and is a reason why tatoos do not disappear after some short time. In my view, this "invention" is more harm than good.
- neuro_image2 6y agoI'm skeptical on a few points: - Several previous attempts have been made to develop minimally invasive systems that rely on magnetic fields to move devices with several limitations. It turns out that this is considerably less reliable and precise than you might initially guess. - The article doesn't state exactly how the microrobot is delivered. If it is into the vascular system there are several challenges with guiding a device through vessels at the scale that they're talking about. There are also significant challenges with moving such a device between different tissue or vascular compartments. - The critical issue with treating gliomas is less the ability to get drugs into the tumor (this is achieve-able through various mechanisms which breack down the blood brain barrier) but more the fact that gliomas are infiltrative pathologies which can't be separated out from functional brain tissue. I feel like the investors have probably been duped by nice sounding speculation from people with limited knowledge of neuropathology and endovascular therapy.
- bflies 6y agoTitle is off, I couldn't figure out why they call these things "robots".
- xg15 6y agoHey, the covid deniers want their conspiracy theory back :)
- pmdulaney 6y agoIsn't this that thing Bill Gates is doing? Doesn't it already come with the Covid vaccine?