It appears that nanomedicine is a bit like London buses in that you wait ages for breakthroughs and then two come along practically simultaneously. I wrote recently about a study from McGill, Polytechnique Montréal, Université de Montréal that examined the use of nanobots to deliver medicine directly to the bloodstream of cancer patients.
“These legions of nanorobotic agents were actually composed of more than 100 million flagellated bacteria – and therefore self-propelled – and loaded with drugs that moved by taking the most direct path between the drug’s injection point and the area of the body to cure,” the team say. “The drug’s propelling force was enough to travel efficiently and enter deep inside the tumours.”
Now, a second team from the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, and the University of California, have gone and developed a remote controlled ‘nano-fish’ that is capable of operating in liquids, such as blood. The devices, which are documented in a recently published paper, could potentially deliver medicines in the same way as the method devised by the previous team.
Nano-fish
The paper reveals that whilst traditional efforts at such devices have used the corkscrew style, but they instead modeled their device on the technique used by fishes.
The completed fish is around 100 times smaller than a single grain of sand, and it swims by applying an oscillating magnetic field, which causes the head and tail to swing, thus propelling the fish forward.
The speed and direction of the device can be controlled by manipulating the speed and position of the oscillating magnet. The team hope that the devices will eventually be used to take medicine to specific parts of the body, much as the previous team hope to do.
The aim of this is to both make drug applications more effective, but also to reduce the need for surgery. Nanotechnology, especially in medicine, has been promised for a few decades now, but it appears that we are gradually making progress.
Check out the video below to see the fish in action.
