ENCORE #156! – I, Robot Nanites Fight Breast Cancer!!!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer in March of 2011, there was a deafening silence from the men I knew. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The following entry first appeared in March of 2018.

Most of this article is behind a paywall, but reading the abstract (science term that sort of means the “summary” of what the paper’s about), I can see the application possibilities. I’d LOVE to read it in full, but NATURE makes its money selling the right to read the papers for absurd amounts…

In the online magazine, Science, an online science news magazine, they translate the abstract into reasonably understandable English (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/nanomachines-drill-holes-cancer-cells)

Even so, it’s still pretty heavy stuff, so I’m going to take a stab at it here.

The basic idea is that by using chemicals, light, and even sound, scientists have created clusters of atoms that hang together and perform in particular ways. It sounds wild, but if you think of all the parts it takes to run your car – or even more simply, your bicycle – it’s nothing radically different. It’s just the scale that’s amazing and the tools they use.

By the way, the things they create – they’re called nanomachines. They first four letters are Latin and means “one-millionth”. So, these nanomachines (if you ever say Will Smith’s movie, I, ROBOT, they used “nanites” (another word for nanomachines and WAY easier to say), to destroy the crazy computer VIKI.) can be programmed to do certain things. Sort of like a set of screwdrivers. I can’t use one of those weird square-nosed ones to take out a Phillips screw. I can certainly try, but it strips the head and makes the job of taking it out afterward a zillion times more work.

What nanite scientists do is count on how atoms attach to each other and set them up so that they can attach together in the right way. In other words, that can set up a nanite so that it’s attracted to a breast cancer cell. In the nanoworld, a breast cancer cell will have certain chemicals around it and on its surface. The nanite looks for the “smell” of the cancer cell and then attaches to it.

They’ve also given their nanite a sort of “drill bit” on one end – a tail on one end to get around, a drill bit on the other to dig into a cancer cell. Wrapped inside of the nanite is a little surprise for the cancer cell – a molecule of chemo drug. Once it’s drilled through the wall of the cancer cell, it shoves the chemo in, then shuts down, its weapon delivered.

Zillions of these little machines seek out and destroy cancer cells, so instead of the chemo taking out hair cells along with the cancer cells, ONLY the cancer cells get zapped.

That’s the theory, and now these articles detail how scientists have made it work in the lab. The next step, of course, will be to see if it works in something alive – usually mice – and finally seeing if it will work in the complex universe (remember how small nanites are – 50,000 of them could line of end-to-end and just make it across the width of a Human HAIR! If you lined up 50,000 people, laying down, feet to head, that would stretch 52 miles) that would be a Human body.

So, we shall see!

Image: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5527/10893068965_1d328e8f71_b.jpg