There is a lot of experimentation going on now that cells can be manipulated readily and cheaply. It's still the very early days, but much can be done. The sor

There is a lot of experimentation going on now that cells can be manipulated readily and cheaply. It's still the very early days, but much can be done. The sort of work described in the article overlaps with that of efforts to enhance cells with additional machinery, such as additional organelles [1] or programmable surface chemistry [2], and the equally interesting approach of creating entirely artificial cell-like entities, designed machinery [3] wrapped in a membrane. [4] We will have microrobotics in our medicine before nanorobotics, I think, and those microrobots will look a lot like cells. There will eventually be a blurring at the boundary between engineered cells - such as those used in trials of some immune therapies and stem cell treatments - and things that are not natural cells but look very much like them. The discovery and development of the moving parts is very similar to that of raw nanomedicine and rudimentary medical nanorobotics, but riding on the back of all the existing cellular machinery enables more to be done sooner and with less. [1]: http://www.unibas.ch/index.cfm?uuid=E11708E2A1B6CA17E9F30BEA67B66F72&show_long=1 http://www.unibas.ch/index.cfm?uuid=E11708E2A1B6CA17E9F30BEA... [2]: http://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2014/04/building-smart-cell-based-therapies.html http://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2014/04/... [3]: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110620161300.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110620161300.ht... [4]: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130404142457.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130404142457.ht...