Medical Nanoscale Robots
Ever since the invention of nanotechnology, scientists tried to foresee its medical potential. By operating on such a small scale, tiny nano-robots could potentially enter the human body, making for better diagnoses, rushing through the bloodstream delivering medicine, or even performing complex operations too difficult for human hands.
“Nanorobotics can play a major role in medical applications, especially for target interventions into the human body through the vascular network,” says Sylvain Martel, director of the nanorobotics laboratory at École Polytechnique de Montréal. ” I believe that nanorobotics could bring new methods and tools to these particular applications.”
While medical molecular machines are not likely to appear soon, there are a great amount of research going into the development of nanoscale robots, and not only for therapeutic use. Can we really use robots at the nano level? Or can we reduce our current machines to that size? We simply do not have the technology yet to make microscopic robotics…
This does not mean that nanomedicine is impossible. Nanomaterials can do anything from improve dental and bone implants, because their mechanical and chemical properties can be tuned to match those of the surrounding tissue, as well as improving medical imaging and better delivering drugs in the body.
Scientists working in this area say the nanorobotic systems could lead to new surgical techniques far more sophisticated and far less invasive than methods currently in use. Such techniques would rely on devices capable to perform diagnostic procedures or repair tissue. “The mechanisms of life operate at the nanoscale,” says Aristides Requicha, director of the laboratory for molecular robotics at the University of Southern California. “If we build devices at their scale, we will be able to interact intimately with them.”
As a discipline, medical nanorobotics remains young for now, but many scientists are already demonstrating new developments they say will form the foundations for the next major breakthroughs in this area. Such breakthroughs could lead to novel applications that offer new ways of accessing small spaces in the human body that would otherwise be unreachable without invasive surgery.
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