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Nanorobots for Drug Delivery?
Roland Piquepaille writes "The idea of using nanorobots to deliver drugs and fight diseases such as cancers is not new. But there are still lots of issues to solve before nanorobots can diagnose our diseases and treat them. Now, an international team of researchers has designed a software and hardware platform of a nanorobot to be used in medical applications. The researchers think their nanorobots could become available around 2015. 'The proposed platform should enable patient pervasive monitoring, and details are given in prognosis with nanorobots application for intracranial treatments. This integrated system also points towards precise diagnosis and smart drug delivery for cancer therapy.'"
Anyone have this nanobot's pager number?
Hey, like many Slashbots I spent a lot of time in front of my computer, leaving me with little chance to exercise. So, where are those nanobots that Neal Stephenson prophesized in The Diamond Age that crawl along your muscles, constantly stimulating them without any effort involved? I could have massive biceps and pecs, but the slow progress of technology is really hurting.
Imagine Al Quida putting a Beowulf Cluster of these in a politician or world leader, making them do strange and dangerous things.......wait a second!
Table-ized A.I.
Ow, come on. Nobody would use this as a weapon.
In the article they mention, "The use of mobile phones with RF is adopted in this platform as the most effective approach for control upload, helping to interface nanorobots communication and energy supply." Thats just gonna roll over real nicely in our RF saturated world. Heck, a cellphone call might cause these things to kill people or a grey goo, end of the world scenario. Anyway this is not recent work, they have been simulating virtual nanobots for sometime now.
Does this mean I will no longer have to stuff balloons in my ass?
They are a neat idea but how about we focus on genetics and DNA reprogramming?
We are made of nano-bots, we just need to learn how to reprogram them.
But seriously, it is ridiculous for these reporters to make such outlandish claims about nanotechnology. Its been 15 years since nanoparticle drug delivery was tested in cells, and we are just beginning phase 1 clinical trials in germany and US on magnetic nanoparticles. Regardless of the FDA implications of nanobots, the actual impact will be very small in the next 20 years, perhaps it could report of blood pressure or flow rate using RFID, but its not going to have robotic arms that will wield a sword and evicerate a cancer cell.
But isn't this how the Borg assimilate people? by injecting nano-robots into the jugular vein of your neck and then the machines attack your Renal glands, central nervous system and brain? How long before treating sickness becomes routine optimization? In general the machines believe they are doing the Humans they assimilate a favor by repairing damage and making enhancements to bodily organs.
Willian Illsey Atkinson wrote a book called nanocosm. I didn't find it that great a read, but he goes on to say that people have misconceptions of what nanobots would be like and how they would work, if we ever make them and get them to work. We have slow progress when it comes to making nanobots to cure illnesses mainly because we have many poeple touting the great potential, but we have very few people willing to learn quantum mechanics and biology. Instead, you have medical doctors who think you can build something equivalent to a car in the nanocosm, and nanotechnology researchers who might think that these robots would only have to perform a simple operation. (But they are limited too, since it is very hard to engineer and build anything at this scale)
The Man will never catch those little guys. It's probably going to take me a year to get a buz though.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
This is the geekiest post I've ever seen on slashdot. I have tears of sublime joy in my eyes right now, you made my night.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Man, the borg sure do have a good health care plan, where do I sign up?
...for the skank bastards to deliver my four ounces. Look, I don't care how many of 'em it takes.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Yesterday I learned about the existence of the 2007 nanotechnology roadmap. Contact me for related ZIP file.
This must give Ray kurzweil a huge boner 8===>
Cool! Just in time for cold fusion power!
And Duke Nukem Forever, you know. Gotta do something while those little fellas get their work done.
Are these nanobots going to have a Posix environment or are we to use something like a Java ME ... Java Nano Edition? Are they going to have an x86 compatible machine code language? The article is so light on details. No processor specs, not even a mention of what version of networking these things support. How am I supposed to build a Beowolf cluster of these?
[signature]
Too bad they don't have a physicist on the team to inform them of the basic and irreducible problems of scale. In that arena surface tension dwarfs any mechanical device that can be forseen. And nature has built millions of models of nanorobots although their time-to-market has been less than exemplary.
I already have have drugs delivered to my door. That's good enough for me. Can we call these things "narcorobots"?
What?
Well, to start with your concern, it's actually pretty easy to put a patient in a Farrady cage, isn't it?
That said, I'm getting tired of "nano" news whose only connection to the topic is that they too want the buzzword that bríngs in teh big grant bucks.
To it, a nano-bot was supposed to be a bit more complex a bit of hardware. You know, stuff that actually resembles -- in any form or shape -- a little autonomous robot.
The closest we have to a natural nano-bot is a Ribosome. It actually interprets a "tape" containing some instructions (messenger RNA) and assembles a protein according to those instructions. It's a tiny little machine tool. I'd take that as the threshold of what I'd consider a "nano-bot".
What we got instead being proclaimed as nano-technology, for no obvious reason other than that "nano" is the buzzword du jour, is:
- mayo. No, really, apparently an emulsion of droplets of substance A in substance B, is suddenly "nano-tech" if the particles are (several (tens of)) nanometres across. No, seriously, that's just too sad to make up.
- some sort of atomizer. (Ditto for droplets of liquid in air.)
- a molecule which happens to interact in some way with a target molecule. FFS, didn't we use to call that "organic chemistry" or "biotech"? I mean, seriously, when renet cleaves some milk proteins to make cheese, that's just that: a molecule interacts with a very specific other molecule. That's stuff we had for thousands of years. When your body processes fructose (e.g., the inverted corn syrup in your favourite soft drink) into glucose (which it can actually use), it's just that: a molecule (enzyme) interacts with another molecule in a well defined way. Etc.
- a molecule forms some kind of a capsid around another molecule. (Ditto. And that's how viruses work.)
- a molecule has a known resonance, and you can break it or activate it or detect it with a wave of that frequency. (Nothing new. Why do you think they feed you barium before taking an x-ray of your stomach or intestines?)
Etc, etc, etc.
And FFS, that's just not what nano-tech was supposed to mean. It's like seeing a bicycle presented as a TIE Fighter, or a laser-LED pointer presented as a lightsaber. It's just not the same fucking thing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to hear about progresses in bio-chemistry, medicine, bio-tech, whatever you want to call it. I have Folding At Home grinding away happily in another thread as I write this.
But FFS, if it's "just" organic chemistry, just call it organic chemistry. I'm sick and tired of idiots redefining words just because they need a grant. I can even understand language evolving when we actually need a new meaning, or when inventing one word saves us from writing ten thousand other words (i.e., jargon.) But, ffs, shanghaiing a word just for a few bucks feels... lame. _That_ is my problem.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
When the nanobots can be programmed to only go after cancer cells, they can inject the chemotherapy right into the cancer cells with minimal harm or side effects to the patient.
We all know that this will actually work. We don't have to worry about drug resistence in disease because resistence is futile!
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Dude, if these buggers can be hacked and RF to communicate and upload code that can influence organs and glands in the body, I could envision a wireless device that would bring about the right response when you get to the bar and find that amazingly hot babe. Just imagine, the worst pickup line is only used to provide enough time to upload the code and release the chemicals in her body. You can continue this thought and potential...
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Reread the summary and article, replacing "nanorobots" with "nanoprobes"...
Makes one think strange things.
True, but surface tension only occurs at interfaces. As you know, these forces disappear when the device (molecule, etc) is present in a single phase, such as when suspended in liquid. Although I didn't RTFA, I suspect nano-scaled mechanical machines may encounter strong surface tension forces at phase interfaces but of course these forces disappear when, for instance, they are suspended in the blood stream or other biofluids.
As you surely know, adhesion to other surfaces can become nontrivial when VDW becomes important at close distances, but otherwise did I miss your point?
You can look at his web page at www.nanorobotdesign.com, which I recall seeing on Slashdot before. The paper he is talking about in the interview is the top one on the page. You can get it from IOP (yes, bugmenot has the password). The paper is nothing but pure speculation on methods and has no implementable design ideas. He spends much on fantasy scenarios of what we could do if we had a little robot like that, and they are not too unreasonable except for the fact that he, like all the other nanotechnologists, doesn't know how to build one.
I suspect that pervasive monitoring, not disease treatment, will end up being the big gain with nano-devices. The starting point for diagnosis at the moment is a patient's description of the symptoms. A person with bio-sensors "installed" will allow a doctor to examine a patient's vital signs directly-- I think this will help to greatly improve a doctor's initial diagnosis, because symptoms are often not a good indicator of what is happening. And the best thing about this kind of device is that it will allow testing to happen over a period of time. Were you to give these to healthy people, you could also establish a "baseline" to compare against when they are in ill health in the future.
There are some obvious privacy concerns here, but were bio-sensors to be inserted in a large number of people, this would greatly benefit epidemiology. That's an application of nano-technology that I would like to see happen, and I think it would revolutionize medical knowledge.
Hmm... no offense, but this is almost as hard to read as my spam folder. I can't even tell what your point really is, there, so I'll just address bits and pieces that stand out at a quick eye-scan.
:P
1. Barium. Barium itself is indeed very toxic, and not just by being a heavy metal. Barium carbonate is used as a rat poison.
The stuff they give you before X-rays, though, is Barium Sulphate. It's saving grace is that it's almost completely non-soluble and not absorbed by your body. So it just ends up going out the other end. (Or the same end if it was an enema.)
2. Nanotech in liquid format. Well,
A) almost all imaginable uses need it to be in _some_ kind of solution. (Even if colloidal.) A nanometre sized bot/agent/whatchamacallit isn't very useful dry, because it will just settle between fibers and the like.
B) which is just as well, because all these things hyped as nanotech today _are_ solutions or working in a solution or colloid. As I was saying, almost all of it is along the lines of either "wheee, we can make nanometre sized droplets" or "whee, we created a molecule which binds to another molecule, but we're suddenly calling it nanotech because we get bigger grants that way. And marketers love the buzzword too."
So, well, if liquid nanotech worries you, you can start worrying now
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I work on nano-bio technology, and I really don't see how his program is going to help me with any of the real problems associated with making useful medical devices. I don't need another visualization program, or ideas of what nanotechnology can do.
We need access to better lithography equipment, nanostructure growth, optical sensors and other mundane, macro scale equipment. Oh, and we need more funding and time to figure out how nanoelectronics interacts with hundreds (thousands?) of biological processes and compounds before anything is put inside anyone. But... that practical stuff isn't as interesting as some neat fictional videos. I guess if he can convince the politicians that nano is a good thing I'm all for it, but the molecular biologists have better graphics, and frankly, better systems for drug delivery. We may not need nanobots for that by 2015.
My Sig is becoming out of date.
- Just trying to survive until the nanobots make me immortal -
Hmmmm no details whatsoever about the actual harware or software architectures. Not even a single picture of a single molecular sized anything. I call BS.
Kharma is like a boomerang. Mine is broken.
I wonder if it's really possible to inject ourselves with nanorobots that would continuously repair our bodies...