Nanobot

Also known as nanorobots or nanites, these microscopic robots operate at the nanoscale to perform tasks with unprecedented precision and efficiency. They aim to perform tasks such as targeted drug delivery in healthcare and enhancing environmental monitoring and remediation
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Technology Life Cycle

Technology Life Cycle

R&D

Initial phase where new technologies are conceptualized and developed. During this stage, technical viability is explored and initial prototypes may be created.

Technology Readiness Level (TRL)

Technology Readiness Level (TRL)

Lab Environment

Experimental analyses are no longer required as multiple component pieces are tested and validated altogether in a lab environment.

Technology Diffusion

Technology Diffusion

Innovators

First to adopt new technologies. They are willing to take risks and are crucial to the initial testing and development of new applications.

Nanobot

Nanobot technology represents a cutting-edge advancement in nanotechnology, offering transformative solutions across a wide range of sectors. These microscopic robots, also known as nanorobots or nanites, operate at the nanoscale to perform tasks with unprecedented precision and efficiency. The core problems nanobot technology aims to solve include targeted drug delivery in healthcare, enhancing environmental monitoring and remediation, improving precision manufacturing processes, and enabling precise agricultural interventions.

The exact design and functionality of nanobots can vary depending on their intended applications, but they generally consist of nanoscale components such as sensors, actuators, propulsors, power sources, and communication modules. These components work together to enable the nanobot to perform specific tasks. Currently, researchers are developing different designs inspired by nature, with features including soft bodies made for swimming, crawling, or walking. Different fabrication techniques are also being developed, including physical, chemical, microfluidic, and self-assembly methods.

They can operate in different environments, including within living organisms, and they hold the potential to revolutionize numerous fields. In medicine and healthcare, nanobots could be designed to navigate through the human body, delivering drugs to highly targeted cells or tissues with high precision, working individually or as a swarm. Applied as a pill, injection, or jet injection, they could also be used for early disease detection, monitoring vital signs, performing minimally invasive surgeries, or targeting cancerous cells or tissue.

For the environment, nanobots provide innovative solutions for pollution cleanup and climate change mitigation. They can detect and neutralize hazardous substances in air and water, contributing to ecosystem restoration and protection. In manufacturing, nanobots enable the assembly of products from the molecular level up, reducing waste and energy consumption, and in agriculture, they enhance crop production through precise soil and plant condition monitoring and pest control.

Future Perspectives

Gathering data from inside the body and managing treatments in real-time could mean a revolution in the field of medicine. These extremely small-scale devices can one day become an integral part of the medical system and even become a popular method for performing some microsurgeries. By helping doctors detect infections much sooner, they enhance the patient's probability of survival by fast and precise diagnosis, thus helping emerge a novel model of body treatment.

Shortly, the development of this technology is expected to become a widespread alternative to painful procedures, such as invasive surgeries and drug blasts. Besides leukemia and cancer, this same technology will restore injured spinal cords over a relatively short period. In particular areas of the body, such as the eyes, these minimally invasive tools could apply drugs in the precise location, a task that is extremely difficult to be performed by the human hand. They could also work in nano dentistry, helping in desensitizing teeth, oral anesthesia, or straightening an irregular set of teeth.

In a more distant future, medical nanobots will be used not only to deploying local treatment but to providing holistic treatments to the patients. These nanobots could be used to releasing chemicals in sequences to treat complex mental disorders or fine-tune the operation of different organs systematically in the body. Moreover, by affecting not only the cells of the body but the internal microbiome system, the medical influence could expand through the brain-gut-skin axis to the mind and the external layers of the skin, achieving a full effect on the body.

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Micro-motor powered nanobots created by UC, San Diego researchers, and propelled by gas bubbles made from a reaction with the contents of the stomach in which they were deposited, have been successfully deployed in the body of a live creature for the very first time.
Since decades, conventional diagnosis and treatment strategies for cancer have been practiced widely despite their expensive and time-consuming process. These conventional contrast and therapeutic agents suffer from various side-effects such as low radiodensity and image resolution, rapid clearance, non-specific biodistribution, poor tumor accumulation, high-dose and multiple-dose requirements, nephrotoxicity, uncontrolled exposure of high electromagnetic radiations, whole-body scans, and so on. Therefore, nanosized imaging and therapeutic probes have been proposed recently owing to their promising efficacy and negligible side-effects. However, these nanoplatforms are struggling deeply to find their clinical translational relevance. Integrating targeting ligands with diagnostic and therapeutic agents within a single system at the nanoscale resulted in localized nanotheranostics. Furthermore, the conceptualized nanotheranostics has been recognized as a clinical ‘weapon’ for localized cancer nanomedicine. In this review, we have covered a wide spectrum of recent developments in cancer nanotheranostics. Numerous examples of functional nanohybrids and clinical relevant materials with their multimode imaging and therapeutics have been addressed here. On the other hand, the importance of combination therapies, imaging-guided tumor regression, deep tissue visualization, localized diagnosis and tumor ablation, manipulation of the tumor microenvironment, and so on have been discussed here. Overall, localized and stimuli responsive nanosized multifunctional platforms have proved their superiority over conventional diagnosis and therapies.
From Ant-Man to the Incredible Shrinking Machine, society has long envisioned developing devices tiny enough to enter human cells. Such nanotechnology could revolutionize the diagnosis of diseases like cancer and neurodegeneration, span new methods of precise drug delivery, and even directly repair damaged organs. Nanomaterials are already used in a host of products such as sunscreens, food, and cosmetics, but equipping these tiny particles with more active functions— the dream of nanomedicine—is still, for the most part, distant. Although researchers in academia and industry alike have pursued developing nanorobotics in medicine, shrinking any hardware runs into its fair share of problems.
It is difficult to place drugs in the right place in the eye. When using droplets, only a small fraction of the drug reaches its target. Injecting drugs into the eye is also more a matter of luck than judgement. Basic researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Stuttgart have developed a nanorobot that can be loaded with active ingredients for treating eye diseases and directed through the solid tissue of the vitreous body.
Directed by David Cage. With Valorie Curry, Bryan Dechart, Jesse Williams, Audrey Boustani. The game allows you to take control of three androids in their quest to discover who they really are.
A man has used thought alone to control nanorobots inside a living creature for the first time. The technology released a drug inside cockroaches in response to the man’s brain activity – a technique that may be useful for treating brain disorders such as schizophrenia and ADHD.
The application of nanotechnology with the new electronic materials led to the development of nanorobots. Nanorobots, in the nano scale region are capable of entering the cell for diagnosis, treatment and surgery. Due to its wide range of applications, nanorobots are designed with specific materials and design technologies. Since the biocompatible materials are used in the design of nanorobots, they are chemically inert and the problem of toxicity is avoided. The nano scale size allows the targeted delivery of drugs to the specific site without affected the normal surrounding cells. Nanorobots can move freely in the bloodstream due to the Brownian motion. This review clearly explains the various biomedical applications of the nanorobots.
DNA origami-based nanorobot presents thrombin to cause tumor infarction after specific recognition of a tumor vessel marker. Nanoscale robots have potential as intelligent drug delivery systems that respond to molecular triggers1,2,3,4. Using DNA origami we constructed an autonomous DNA robot programmed to transport payloads and present them specifically in tumors. Our nanorobot is functionalized on the outside with a DNA aptamer that binds nucleolin, a protein specifically expressed on tumor-associated endothelial cells5, and the blood coagulation protease thrombin within its inner cavity. The nucleolin-targeting aptamer serves both as a targeting domain and as a molecular trigger for the mechanical opening of the DNA nanorobot. The thrombin inside is thus exposed and activates coagulation at the tumor site. Using tumor-bearing mouse models, we demonstrate that intravenously injected DNA nanorobots deliver thrombin specifically to tumor-associated blood vessels and induce intravascular thrombosis, resulting in tumor necrosis and inhibition of tumor growth. The nanorobot proved safe and immunologically inert in mice and Bama miniature pigs. Our data show that DNA nanorobots represent a promising strategy for precise drug delivery in cancer therapy.
In the science-fiction classic Fantastic Voyage [1], a shrink-ray zaps a submarine and the crew within it, and the resulting microscopic vehicle ventures inside a human body to destroy a blood clot and save a prominent patient's life. While that scenario remains in the realm of make-believe, it may not be long before micro- and nanoscale robots can navigate a person's blood vessels and execute a medical task, such as the targeted delivery of drugs or even the performance of some medical procedures.
Imagine you go to the doctor to get treatment for a disease and instead of giving you a pill or a shot, the doctor refers you to a special medical team which implants a tiny robot into your bloodstream.
An overview of the latest nanobot and nanotechnology advances driving innovations in healthcare and medicine, including new challenges.

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