A lot of research universities around the world are eager to find new diagnostic and therapeutic tools with the help of nanotechnology. We could say that the founding father of this scientific field was physicist Richard P. Feynman, who in 1959 first described a process in which scientists would be able to manipulate and control individual atoms and molecules. This small matter could be the glial cells in our brain, liver hepatocytes, or even cells in our blood stream.
Alongside the nanotechnology a new field has emerged, nanorobotics, which is used to design and build nanorobots, miniature robots of a size of a few micrometers that could help us to early diagnose a patient’s disease or to treat the disease by carrying therapeutic drugs targeting tumor cells.
Just recently researchers at the MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and move across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound. Furthermore, the researchers at the University of California successfully performed an experiment of implanting the acid-fueled micromotors into a mouse’s stomach to deliver and release of therapeutic payloads.
At the moment, everybody in the nanorobotics is picking their brain to figure out how to build these tiny robotic heroes, so to speak, that will be small enough to travel around inside of our body to fight the diseases we cannot fight alone.
Take a look at the video “Ingestible Tiny Robots Can Now Save Your Life” where Trace Dominguez and Julian Huguet from DNews explain how small can robots get and invite you to win the Feynman Grand Prize. Enjoy!
Blazka Orel, MSc, BioSistemika LLC
