Nanobots. Microscopic robots capable of remodeling tissue, repairing individual cells, eliminating pathogens, rooting out disease, even restoring entire organs; a cure-all promised by the Sci-Fi books and movies I devoured growing up. Since I was young, I’ve been fascinated by the potential of nanobots to heal and alter the human body.

But the tiny metal machines I envisioned as a child, ones with robotic spider legs and glowing red eyes, can’t be built at the micro and nanoscopic level. The robots you and I think of today can’t be miniaturized to the extent necessary to interact with or alter individual cells.

But robots don’t have to be metal and neither do machines.

A robot is simply a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically or in response to a certain stimulus. In that sense, our very cells are like organic robots.
In fact, there are many things that can act intelligently, or at least predictably, at the micro and nanoscales. With these materials and a little biological know-how, one can build molecular machines capable of interacting with cells.

Nanoparticles (NPs) are a great example. NPs come in many different flavors and can be altered to suit a variety of purposes. Commonly made of organic polymers like PLGA (poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid)) and n-BCA (poly(butyl cyanoacrylate)), they have been utilized extensively in the field of drug delivery to allow insoluble compounds passage through the blood, to target specific cell types, and to hide drugs from macrophages that would remove them from circulation.

I want to dedicate this blog to investigating the ways in which biomaterials can be used to build molecular machines at the nanoscale as well as how these machines can be further developed, improved and applied to the treatment of human disease.

I’ll start off with recent publication in Nature Biotechnology. Researchers from Arizona State University and the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have succeeded in creating molecular machines using DNA origami. They’ve programmed folded DNA to target tumors and shut off their nutrient supply by clotting the surrounding blood vessels. Here’s a cool graphic that explains the basic approach.

Here’s a link to the paper.