Magnet-Steered Nano-Fish Could Deliver Drugs and Sweep Body Toxins

dkatana writes: David Warner writes on InformationWeek how "nanoengineers" from UC San Diego have created microscopic fish powered by hydrogen peroxide that use magnets to steer themselves. "The "fish" are powerful enough to swim through your bloodstream, removing toxins or bringing medicine directly to crucial parts of your body, as cells in your blood stream do. Given enough time, the fish could be used to deliver drugs directly to cancer tumors or parts of your body that are too fragile for surgery."

Comments

So far, so good

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

So is there hydrogen peroxide naturally in blood, or it can be safely introduced, to drive these things? (It reacts with platinum particles in the tail to provide thrust, and are externally guided by magnetism via iron in the nose.)

Drug delivery is by ramming into the area in question and dissolving, releasing the payload (already proven in previous, simpler experiments.)

Bad particle "eating" is done by binding the fish with some chemical that attaches to it.

Re:So far, so good

[binarylarry]

So all we need is some kind of embedded AI vision system to detect cancerous cells and kill them.

Should make for some interesting CIA and FSB asssasinations.

Afterwards people can say:

[nospam007]

"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"

Re:Afterwards people can say:

[rmdingler]

Tough crowd.

Powered by hydrogen peroxide?

[GrumpySteen]

You know what else hydrogen peroxide reacts to? Blood!

Blood contains he enzyme catalase which really likes to react with hydrogen peroxide to make a foamy mess that would not be the healthiest thing to have in your blood vessels.

Re:Powered by hydrogen peroxide?

[penguinoid]

Coward! I myself am planning to use the peroxide fish as a source of oxygen so I don't need to breathe.

And don't you tell me not to hold my breath.

Doesn't seem practical

[ITRambo]

Powered by hydrogen peroxide that comes from where? There is no information in the linked article. If a person's blood is flowing why do they need to be "powered" at all if steered by magnetism? No one needs tiny devices that release hydrogen gas into their blood stream. So, remove the "powered" part, just steer it and it just might work without causing hydrogen embolisms.

FTA

[rmdingler]

"Of course, nanobots are often the source of speculation about the death of all humanity. There is the "grey goo" theory that one day nanobots will learn to self-replicate and quickly eat everything organic on the planet in a never-ending urge to procreate. There are several explanations about why this couldn't happen, including the fact that we could stop it with a fairly simple electromagnetic pulse. But it is fun to think that with this step toward a viable 3D-printed microscopic delivery device we are either one step closer to curing all the diseases of mankind or one step closer to just destroying ourselves entirely. Or both."

It's the way of too many of our watershed technological breakthroughs. When you ask if we are ready for the responsibility of a potential Doomsday Device, be certain to solve for (we).

I was skeptical

[kencurry]

at first, nanobots delivering drugs in the bloodstream and all...

But then, I read that they were "3D printed" nanobots, and I was all like "Whoahh, these guys are onto something!"

Re:I was skeptical

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? If anything, "3D printed" should immediately raise healthy skepticism.

Re: Oh good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the last thing we want is to have carp floating around in our blood stream.

Speaking of Adams references

[davidwr]

Let me know when they've got a fish they can put in my ear that will auto-translate...

... consistently and accurately. [Yeah, I know, I'm being picky.]

Re: Oh good grief

[gregor-e]

But TOXINS! In your blood!

Re:Oh good grief

[Hartree]

Nanotech has become a buzzword that can refer to excellent research or crackpottery depending on what's desired by the speaker. I hope you're restricting your rant to the crackpottery. but tossing baby with bathwater is practically an Olympic sport around Slashdot.

On the other hand, we've long used a lot of chemistry of all sorts that we really don't understand.

Just because we're not likely to get full up assemblers in the short term hardly means that nothing good will come of what's broadly termed nanotech.

Re:Hey mister negative....

[Anonymous Coward]

Those promises aren't in the article anywhere. Nor are they in the definition of "Nanotechnology" as offered by Google:

"the branch of technology that deals with dimensions and tolerances of less than 100 nanometers, especially the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules."

These "fish" machines qualify, and they sound useful.

You are injecting claims so you can then complain about how they have not been met. Why would you do this?

Re:Hey mister negative....

[someone1234]

If you think about it, nanomachines shouldn't be smaller than a bacterium. Just because something isn't below 1 micron it could be qualified as nanotecnology, especially stuff that moves around in a living body. Microtechnology is already used for a different thing. So what, 30k nanometers is still small enough to work safely in blood vessels. Probably it can become smaller by a factor, but i doubt "nanomachines" can or should become smaller than that.

But before they can say:

[Errol backfiring]

"Resistance is Futile"

Re:Oh good grief

[lucien86]

Hate to agree with you but in some ways I do. I actually worked on solving the problems of assemblers way back in the early 1990's. I solved a core technical problem - which ultimately turned out to be the solution to building Strong AI. Over twenty years later and neither exists even now...

Back then they said that assemblers were 10 years and $10 billion worth of focused research away. I would say that's almost exactly true today.. (maybe it was 'almost' true even back then)

The real problem with assemblers is that there is so much BS about them. The technology's so complicated that even with a working machine it might take another 10 - 20 years before anyone can do anything useful with it. People also totally over-estimate what the things will be able to do - and massively under-estimate how long the machines would take to do it. - The 'perfect' worst example that comes to mind is the Knight Rider remake - sure assemblers could reshape a car like that -MAYBE- but it would take them months or years to do it each time someone pushed the button.

The first real problem with diamond assemblers is that they would need to be cryogenically cooled to work and kept in an environment even more extreme and clean than the current best IC factories... The things will have terrible problems getting enough power to work and even worse problems with overheating.. The real killer though is that the 'reproduction' process itself is the hardest of all - and either very slow and complex - or actually just about impossible..

On the other side of the coin, research totally away from assemblers has already achieved virtually the same thing - synthetic life. Ok today everything is still very primitive, but it has a broad front of research and things are definitely actually advancing.. The simple real truth is that new science and new technologies are difficult and don't take five minutes to get right.. Doesn't mean its not worthwhile..