14 DAY TRIAL // A team of scientists have come up with a type of nanobot that can act as a delivery van, of sorts, for compounds capable of healing diseased cells. They might be the answer to curing cancer.
DNA has always been a subject of science fiction, as have nanites, otherwise known as nanobots, but the idea of DNA-based nanobot is rarely encountered, since robots are usually depicted as more, shall we say, artificial.
Real-life researchers aren't as concerned with the looks of their inventions, however, as they are with getting the job done. They also think more outside the box than some would think.
That's why a team composed of researchers from the United States and Israel were able to invent DNA-based nanites.
Daniel Levner, a bioengineer at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, worked together with some colleagues from Bar Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel.
They managed to create DNA whose sequences unravel when they meet a certain protein. So they could, say, designate a “recipient.”
They then tested their idea by choosing diseased cell, cancerous ones as it were, as the “recipient,” after which the DNA was loaded with drugs and fluorescent markers. All that remained was to inject the nanobots in a tissue and wait and see what happened.
As far as biological therapy goes, it's a pretty big step forward, and might even allow a cure to be found for cancer or other diseases.
Such bots could even be “programmed” to respond to bacteria, so you could, for example, load them with a substance that only harms such things, or viruses. Designate a specific protein as the “recipient” and the nanobots will do the rest.
There is no homing function of course, but if you inject enough of them in someone's bloodstream, they're bound to run into the “enemy” eventually.
But it's the possibility of turning such nanobots into actual computers that intrigue the scientists. The nanobots can be tweaked to reach to the expansion of others of their kinds, thus turning them into a sort of low-end hive mind, like a biocomputer.
Angel Goni Moreno of the National Center for Biotechnology in Madrid, Spain, says that you could have computerized cockroaches with computing power on par with Commodore 64 or Atari 800 systems. All because biological therapy was shown, in the past, capable of matching how a computer processor works.
So yes, swarms of nanobots could work together to eradicate cancer. Human testing might even start in five years' time.