Written by Ajitesh Sharma
Nano-bots, What’s the buzz?
With the ever-so changing terrain of biomedical engineering, a prominent idea has been brought up over and over. Nanobots. Nanobots are in layman terms, a task-achieving device that has the dimensions of under roughly a nano-meter. For scale, a human DNA strand is 2.5 nano-meters long. These robots are theoretically supposed to go under the blood to fix/monitor various problems in the human body system. Monitoring blood sugar to even kill cancers are only a few of the possibilities of a nano-bot. The nano-bots are able to avoid white blood cells, (the blood cells that fight off viruses) because they’re coated in human molecules.
Nanobots: How do they work?
Nano-bots have a lot of parts. As stated previously, these can depend on what the function of the nano-bot is. Most generally, nano-bots involve an energy source. There are some ideas of how the nano-bot could be powered, being using electrons from blood cells to initiate a chemical reaction inside your own body (talk about scary!). There are also a variety of ideas of how a nano-bot would move inside of an organism’s blood stream. Since the nano-bot is almost 2.5 nano-meters long; a battery or simple energy source won’t make it in. Researchers have been experimenting with a few new ways of direct movement.
Chemical movement is by far the most speedy out of the bunch, but it involves dangerous chemicals, like hydrochloric acid. Chemical movement also lacks directionality, meaning you can’t really control which direction it will go in the bloodstream.
Radiant/UV related movement related movement requires a high severity of light, which will prove to be hard in the bloodstream, and lessening the biocompatibility of a wire.
Ultrasound movement is a weird one, and while it is biocompatible with the body; it is pretty much impossible to control the direction.
Why Aren’t They a Mainstream Thing Yet?
Why don’t we have nano-robotics yet though? The simplest answer is because the gravity inside a living organism’s bloodstream is quite strong. Therefore, the nano-bots need more energy to move against gravity. This is a huge problem, as to provide for the energy, you need more than a nano-meter of space, meaning that an actual working nano-bot with an energy source will not work. Additionally, this kind of technology will cost a lot, as you need precise measurements and tools to put in the nano-bot. We’re also not sure if the nano-bot will be able to hide against the immune system of the body it is inside, which may lead to malfunctions, (and obviously, you don’t want a malfunctioning nano-bot inside your bloodstream).
New Developments
New research is still being done with Nano-bots. Specifically, animal testing. Recently, Nano-bots made a breakthrough by getting a 90% accuracy of finding bladder tumors in mice. If that carries on with humans, the results will be huge. More and more cases are appearing; “Nano-bots remove heavy metals from water bodies”, “Nano-bots treating pneumonia in mice”. Because of the significance of nano-bots, the theoretical gamechangers; investing in nano-technology is reaching a climax of almost $1T, and rising. So, in 10–20 years, there’s a chance that remote controlled nano-bots are in your bloodstream. Finding and erasing your malignant cancer tumors!
MCR Committee: Biomedical Engineering
References:
Wikipedia contributors. (2024, February 8). Nanorobotics. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanorobotics
https://nanopartikel.info/en/basics/cross-cutting/nanobots-reality-or-fiction/#:~:text=The%20gravitational%20forces%20between%20matter,%2D%20 or%20 millimeter%2d Size%20 structures.
Subramani, K., & Mehta, M. (2012). Nanodiagnostics in microbiology and dentistry. In Elsevier eBooks (pp. 365–390). https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-1-4557-7862-1.00021-3
AZoNano. (2022, November 14). Fitting Magnetically Controlled Nanobots into the Future of Medicine. https://www.azonano.com/news.aspx?newsID=39892
Phys.org — news and articles on science and technology. (n.d.). https://phys.org/tags/nanorobot/