Imagine this: no more pills, no more IVs, and no more painful vaccinations. And yet, medicine continues to work to fight pathogens and keep us healthy. On the outside, it might look like magic, but on the inside, something cooler: medical nanorobots. 

What are nanorobots? Nanorobots are robots that are scaled down to a billionth of a meter, and they are programmed to carry out specific tasks. Nanorobots can do anything from deliver medicine to the body to provide a cure for cancer. Nanorobotics is still a massively growing field and not a lot of fully-tested nanorobots exist today. However, there are many nanorobotics researchers working on solutions to make realities such as a world without pills and shots possible.

Nanorobots can be made and used in a variety of ways, and their small size allows them to contribute to vaccines. Dr. Claire Zeng, a researcher at the William Shih Lab in the Department of Cancer Biology at Harvard Medical School stated that in the lab, they “...use the DNA nanostructures to carry antigens and adjuvants…it's highly programmable and it's highly addressable. There are so many modification sites on the DNA origami that you can put different payloads on it.” By using a method based on DNA origami, Dr. Zeng and the other researchers are able to create DNA nanobots that can hold specific things, such as tumor antigens, to provide medicine. Dr. Zeng also stated that by using the nanoparticle to co-deliver antigens, the vaccine can be stronger and have a higher retention rate.

Nanorobots can also be used for targeted delivery of medicine. Since nanorobots are very tiny, they can bypass barriers in the human body and can be used to deliver certain antidotes to specific parts of the body. In an interview with Dr. Mariana Alacron-Correa, a researcher at the Micro Nano and Molecular Systems Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, about her work in creating nanorobots that are the size of bacteria that can propel themselves, she explained that the group “...fabricated this robot that has this helical structure on the back, and we tried to mimic the bacteria movement. By turning a magnetic field, you can turn this whole structure, and thanks to the robots being so small, and the drag forces being so low at the sizes, they can move forward…because this type of propulsion is so good…we're developing new materials to create the same structures but they're either more biocompatible or they dissolve after some time…we can do some drug delivery with these robots.” In other words, thanks to nanorobots’ size and ability to move on their own with low resistance, they can deliver drugs and allow researchers to control the way medicine is injected into the body.

Alongside treatment, nanorobots also have applications in diagnosing some diseases. For instance, nanotechnology is currently being used to diagnose and treat plaque buildup in the arteries, known as atherosclerosis. The researchers working on this created a nanoparticle that can mimic the high-density lipoprotein that can help shrink the plaque. By using nanorobots in multiple aspects of medical care, medicine can be made more efficient in a way that helps powerful treatments be accessible to many people. 

In fact, nanorobots have also been shown to expand the capabilities of treatments available by targeting tumors that cannot be treated by traditional chemotherapy. Many research groups use bacteria as inspiration for nanorobotics, including a research group in Canada, led by Sylvain Martel, the director of the Polytechnique Montreal Nanorobotics Laboratory. Martel’s group has created microscopic and magnetic nanobots that can be steered by MRI and self-propel, and the team has stated that a swarm of these devices was able to reach tumors in mouse models. Given the current applications, more research can only enhance the way we approach cancer treatment in the future.  

As shown by the various ways nanorobots can be used for targeted drug delivery, targeting tumors, and developing a cancer vaccine, nanorobotics can have many advantages, but they can be especially useful in the medical field.

References

Applications of Nanotechnology. (n.d.). National Nanotechnology Initiative. Retrieved January 5, 2023, from nano.gov/about-nanotechnology/applications-nanotechnology

What are nanobots? (n.d.). Nanowerk. Retrieved January 5, 2023, from nanowerk.com/what-are-nanobots.php

The state of nanorobotics in medicine. (2019, October 7). IEEE Pulse. Retrieved January 12, 2023, from embs.org/pulse/articles/the-state-of-nanorobotics-in-medicine/

Hu, M., Ge, X., Chen, X., Mao, W., Qian, X., & Yuan, W. E. (2020). Micro/Nanorobot: A promising targeted drug delivery system. Pharmaceutics, 12(7), 665. doi.org/10.3390/pharmaceutics12070665