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"In the short term, these micro-robots could be used to deliver cancer drugs (or any kind of medication) in a highly-targeted fashion, rather than the carpet bo
by JunkDNA 15y ago
"In the short term, these micro-robots could be used to deliver cancer drugs (or any kind of medication) in a highly-targeted fashion, rather than the carpet bombing approach that is currently used"
You can almost always find the cancer therapy tie-in with these kinds of things. In this case "near term" would be 15-20 years at best. Getting stuff inside of cells without the immune system going caveman on your nanobot along the way is a hard problem.
- Symmetry 15y agoInside cells? That certainly is way off - but things like getting chemotherapy drugs mostly to the organ or body part that is cancerous should be much easier.
- mrsebastian 15y agoYeah, similar tech was demonstrated earlier this year I think -- little balls that carried anti-cancer drugs to tumors in mice. I think they were controlled with magnets.
- JunkDNA 15y agoYep, we've cured cancer in mice several times over. Humans are the hard part.
- JunkDNA 15y agoThis still has massive hurdles. If you're going to have nanobots running around in your bloodstream, you need to protect them from the immune system. Worst case, you might have a massive immune response against the nanobots that causes a person to go into anaphylaxis. Somehow, you have to make them biologically inert without affecting our ability to control them or have them work. There is some success using antibodies to deliver targeted therapies to certain organs, but in general, this drug delivery is a very hard problem. If we were able to solve it, then we would easily cure cancer. There are tons of chemicals that are toxic to the body as a whole, but would work great if you could narrowly target to the tissue or cells of interest.