Tag Archives: nanorobots

Nanoscientists speculate that artificial life forms could be medicine of the future

Even after all these years, my jaw is still capable of dropping but then I read the details. This looks a lot like ‘medical nanobots’ which researchers have been talking about for a long time. Nice twist on a familiar theme. From an October 5, 2023 news item on ScienceDaily,

Imagine a life form that doesn’t resemble any of the organisms found on the tree of life. One that has its own unique control system, and that a doctor would want to send into your body. It sounds like a science fiction movie, but according to nanoscientists, it can—and should—happen in the future.

Creating artificial life is a recurring theme in both science and popular literature, where it conjures images of creeping slime creatures with malevolent intentions or super-cute designer pets. At the same time, the question arises: What role should artificial life play in our environment here on Earth, where all life forms are created by nature and have their own place and purpose?

Associate professor Chenguang Lou from the Department of Physics, Chemistry, and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark, together with Professor Hanbin Mao from Kent State University, is the parent of a special artificial hybrid molecule that could lead to the creation of artificial life forms. They have now published a review in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science on the state of research in the field behind their creation. The field is called “hybrid peptide-DNA nanostructures,” and it is an emerging field, less than ten years old.

An October 5, 2023 University of Southern Denmark press release (also on EurekAlert) by Birgitte Svennevig, which originated the news item, shares the researcher’s (Chenguang Lou) vision for the research and more technical details about “hybrid peptide-DNA nanostructures” along with other international research efforts,

Lou’s vision is to create viral vaccines (modified and weakened versions of a virus) and artificial life forms that can be used for diagnosing and treating diseases.

“In nature, most organisms have natural enemies, but some do not. For example, some disease-causing viruses have no natural enemy. It would be a logical step to create an artificial life form that could become an enemy to them,” he says.

Similarly, he envisions such artificial life forms can act as vaccines against viral infection and can be used as nanorobots [also known as nanobots] or nanomachines loaded with medication or diagnostic elements and sent into a patient’s body.

“An artificial viral vaccine may be about 10 years away. An artificial cell, on the other hand, is on the horizon because it consists of many elements that need to be controlled before we can start building with them. But with the knowledge we have, there is, in principle, no hindrance to produce artificial cellular organisms in the future,” he says.

What are the building blocks that Lou and his colleagues in this field will use to create viral vaccines and artificial life? DNA and peptides are some of the most important biomolecules in nature, making DNA technology and peptide technology the two most powerful molecular tools in the nanotechnological toolkit today. DNA technology provides precise control over programming, from the atomic level to the macro level, but it can only provide limited chemical functions since it only has four bases: A, C, G, and T. Peptide technology, on the other hand, can provide sufficient chemical functions on a large scale, as there are 20 amino acids to work with. Nature uses both DNA and peptides to build various protein factories found in cells, allowing them to evolve into organisms.

Recently, Hanbin Mao and Chenguang Lou have succeeded in linking designed three-stranded DNA structures with three-stranded peptide structures, thus creating an artificial hybrid molecule that combines the strengths of both. This work was published in Nature Communications in 2022. (read the article here “Chirality transmission in macromolecular domains” and the press release at https://www.sdu.dk/en/om_sdu/fakulteterne/naturvidenskab/nyheder-2022/supermolekyle)

Elsewhere in the world, other researchers are also working on connecting DNA and peptides because this connection forms a strong foundation for the development of more advanced biological entities and life forms.

At Oxford University, researchers have succeeded in building a nanomachine made of DNA and peptides that can drill through a cell membrane, creating an artificial membrane channel through which small molecules can pass. (Spruijt et al., Nat. Nanotechnol. 2018, 13, 739-745)

At Arizona State University, Nicholas Stephanopoulos and colleagues have enabled DNA and peptides to self-assemble into 2D and 3D structures. (Buchberger et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2020, 142, 1406-1416)

At Northwest University [Northwestern University?], researchers have shown that microfibers can form in conjunction with DNA and peptides self-assembling. DNA and peptides operate at the nano level, so when considering the size differences, microfibers are huge. (Freeman et al., Science, 2018, 362, 808-813)

At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, scientists have used hybrid molecules to create an onion-like spherical structure containing cancer medication, which holds promise to be used in the body to target cancerous tumors. (Chotera et al., Chem. Eur. J., 2018, 24, 10128-10135)

“In my view, the overall value of all these efforts is that they can be used to improve society’s ability to diagnose and treat sick people. Looking forward, I will not be surprised that one day we can arbitrarily create hybrid nanomachines, viral vaccines and even artificial life forms from these building blocks to help the society to combat those difficult-to-cure diseases. It would be a revolution in healthcare,” says Chenguang Lou.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the latest paper,

Peptide-DNA conjugates as building blocks for de novo design of hybrid nanostructures by Mathias Bogetoft Danielsen, Hanbin Mao, Chenguang Lou. Cell Reports Physical Science Volume 4, Issue 10, 18 October 2023, 101620 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrp.2023.101620

This paper is open access.

Clean up soil and water or deliver drugs with nanobots

Nanobots/nanorobots/nanoswimmers or whatever they’re called, could prove to be quite useful for environmental remediation efforts or medical delivery systems according to a June 29, 2021 news item on Nanowerk (Note: One link has been removed),

CU Boulder [University of Colorado at Boulder] researchers have discovered that minuscule, self-propelled particles called “nanoswimmers” can escape from mazes as much as 20 times faster than other, passive particles, paving the way for their use in everything from industrial clean-ups to medication delivery.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (“Mechanisms of transport enhancement for self-propelled nanoswimmers in a porous matrix”), describe how these tiny synthetic nanorobots are incredibly effective at escaping cavities within maze-like environments. These nanoswimmers could one day be used to remediate contaminated soil, improve water filtration or even deliver drugs to targeted areas of the body, like within dense tissues.

A June 29, 2021 University of Colorado at Boulder news release (also on EurekAlert) by Kelsey Simpkins, which originated the news item, explains what makes these nanobots different,

“This is the discovery of an entirely new phenomenon that points to a broad potential range of applications,” said Daniel Schwartz, senior author of the paper and Glenn L. Murphy Endowed Professor of chemical and biological engineering.

These nanoswimmers came to the attention of the theoretical physics community about 20 years ago, and people imagined a wealth of real-world applications, according to Schwartz. But unfortunately these tangible applications have not yet been realized, in part because it’s been quite difficult to observe and model their movement in relevant environments–until now.

These nanoswimmers, also called Janus particles (named after a Roman two-headed god), are tiny spherical particles composed of polymer or silica, engineered with different chemical properties on each side of the sphere. One hemisphere promotes chemical reactions to occur, but not the other. This creates a chemical field which allows the particle to take energy from the environment and convert it into directional motion–also known as self-propulsion.

“In biology and living organisms, cell propulsion is the dominant mechanism that causes motion to occur, and yet, in engineered applications, it’s rarely used. Our work suggests that there is a lot we can do with self-propulsion,” said Schwartz.

In contrast, passive particles which move about randomly (a kind of motion known as Brownian motion) are known as Brownian particles. They’re named after 19th century scientist Robert Brown, who studied such things as the random motion of pollen grains suspended in water.

The researchers converted these passive Brownian particles into Janus particles (nanoswimmers) for this research. Then they made these self-propelled nanoswimmers try to move through a maze, made of a porous medium, and compared how efficiently and effectively they found escape routes compared to the passive, Brownian particles.

The results were shocking, even to the researchers.

The Janus particles were incredibly effective at escaping cavities within the maze–as much as 20 times faster than the Brownian particles–because they moved strategically along the cavity walls searching for holes, which allowed them to find the exits very quickly. Their self-propulsion also appeared to give them a boost of energy needed to pass through the exit holes within the maze.

“We know we have a lot of applications for nanorobots, especially in very confined environments, but we didn’t really know how they move and what the advantages are compared to traditional Brownian particles. That’s why we started a comparison between these two,” said Haichao Wu, lead author of the paper and graduate student in chemical and biological engineering. “And we found that nanoswimmers are able to use a totally different way to search around these maze environments.”

While these particles are incredibly small, around 250 nanometers–just wider than a human hair (160 nanometers) but still much, much smaller than the head of a pin (1-2 millimeters)–the work is scalable. This means that these particles could navigate and permeate spaces as microscopic as human tissue to carry cargo and deliver drugs, as well as through soil underground or beaches of sand to remove unwanted pollutants.

Swarming nanoswimmers 

The next step in this line of research is to understand how nanoswimmers behave in groups within confined environments, or in combination with passive particles.

“In open environments, nanoswimmers are known to display emergent behavior–behavior that is more than the sum of its parts–that mimics the swarming motion of flocks of birds or schools of fish. That’s been a lot of the impetus for studying them,” said Schwartz.

One of the main obstacles to reaching this goal is the difficulty involved in being able to observe and understand the 3D movement of these tiny particles deep within a material comprising complex interconnected spaces.

Wu overcame this hurdle by using refractive index liquid in the porous medium, which is liquid that affects how fast light travels through a material. This made the maze essentially invisible, while allowing the observation of 3D particle motion using a technique known as double-helix point spread function microscopy.

This enabled Wu to track three-dimensional trajectories of the particles and create visual representations, a major advancement from typical 2D modeling of nanoparticles. Without this advancement, it would not be possible to better understand the movement and behavior of either individuals or groups of nanoswimmers.

“This paper is the first step: It provides a model system and the imaging platform that enables us to answer these questions,” said Wu. “The next step is to use this model with a larger population of nanoswimmers, to study how they are able to interact with each other in a confined environment.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Mechanisms of transport enhancement for self-propelled nanoswimmers in a porous matrix by Haichao Wu, Benjamin Greydanus, and Daniel K. Schwartz. PNAS July 6, 2021 118 (27) e2101807118; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101807118

This paper is behind a paywall.

Carbon nanotubes can scavenge energy from environment to generate electricity

A June 7, 2021 news item on phys.org announces research into a new method for generating electricity (Note: A link has been removed),

MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.

The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a current that could be used to drive chemical reactions or to power micro- or nanoscale robots, the researchers say.

“This mechanism is new, and this way of generating energy is completely new,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “This technology is intriguing because all you have to do is flow a solvent through a bed of these particles. This allows you to do electrochemistry, but with no wires.”

A June 7, 2021 MIT news release (also on EurekAlert), which generated the news item, delves further into the research,

In a new study describing this phenomenon, the researchers showed that they could use this electric current to drive a reaction known as alcohol oxidation — an organic chemical reaction that is important in the chemical industry.

Strano is the senior author of the paper, which appears today [June 7, 2021] in Nature Communications. The lead authors of the study are MIT graduate student Albert Tianxiang Liu and former MIT researcher Yuichiro Kunai. Other authors include former graduate student Anton Cottrill, postdocs Amir Kaplan and Hyunah Kim, graduate student Ge Zhang, and recent MIT graduates Rafid Mollah and Yannick Eatmon.

Unique properties

The new discovery grew out of Strano’s research on carbon nanotubes — hollow tubes made of a lattice of carbon atoms, which have unique electrical properties. In 2010, Strano demonstrated, for the first time, that carbon nanotubes can generate “thermopower waves.” When a carbon nanotube is coated with layer of fuel, moving pulses of heat, or thermopower waves, travel along the tube, creating an electrical current.

That work led Strano and his students to uncover a related feature of carbon nanotubes. They found that when part of a nanotube is coated with a Teflon-like polymer, it creates an asymmetry that makes it possible for electrons to flow from the coated to the uncoated part of the tube, generating an electrical current. Those electrons can be drawn out by submerging the particles in a solvent that is hungry for electrons.

To harness this special capability, the researchers created electricity-generating particles by grinding up carbon nanotubes and forming them into a sheet of paper-like material. One side of each sheet was coated with a Teflon-like polymer, and the researchers then cut out small particles, which can be any shape or size. For this study, they made particles that were 250 microns by 250 microns.

When these particles are submerged in an organic solvent such as acetonitrile, the solvent adheres to the uncoated surface of the particles and begins pulling electrons out of them.

“The solvent takes electrons away, and the system tries to equilibrate by moving electrons,” Strano says. “There’s no sophisticated battery chemistry inside. It’s just a particle and you put it into solvent and it starts generating an electric field.”

Particle power

The current version of the particles can generate about 0.7 volts of electricity per particle. In this study, the researchers also showed that they can form arrays of hundreds of particles in a small test tube. This “packed bed” reactor generates enough energy to power a chemical reaction called an alcohol oxidation, in which an alcohol is converted to an aldehyde or a ketone. Usually, this reaction is not performed using electrochemistry because it would require too much external current.

“Because the packed bed reactor is compact, it has more flexibility in terms of applications than a large electrochemical reactor,” Zhang says. “The particles can be made very small, and they don’t require any external wires in order to drive the electrochemical reaction.”

In future work, Strano hopes to use this kind of energy generation to build polymers using only carbon dioxide as a starting material. In a related project, he has already created polymers that can regenerate themselves using carbon dioxide as a building material, in a process powered by solar energy. This work is inspired by carbon fixation, the set of chemical reactions that plants use to build sugars from carbon dioxide, using energy from the sun.

In the longer term, this approach could also be used to power micro- or nanoscale robots. Strano’s lab has already begun building robots at that scale, which could one day be used as diagnostic or environmental sensors. The idea of being able to scavenge energy from the environment to power these kinds of robots is appealing, he says.

“It means you don’t have to put the energy storage on board,” he says. “What we like about this mechanism is that you can take the energy, at least in part, from the environment.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Solvent-induced electrochemistry at an electrically asymmetric carbon Janus particle by Albert Tianxiang Liu, Yuichiro Kunai, Anton L. Cottrill, Amir Kaplan, Ge Zhang, Hyunah Kim, Rafid S. Mollah, Yannick L. Eatmon & Michael S. Strano. Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 3415 (2021) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23038-7Published 07 June 2021

This paper is open access.

Gold spring-shaped coils for detecting twisted molecules

An April 3, 2017 news item on ScienceDaily describes a technique that could improve nanorobotics and more,

University of Bath scientists have used gold spring-shaped coils 5,000 times thinner than human hairs with powerful lasers to enable the detection of twisted molecules, and the applications could improve pharmaceutical design, telecommunications and nanorobotics.

An April 3, 2017 University of Bath press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more detail (Note: A link has been removed),

Molecules, including many pharmaceuticals, twist in certain ways and can exist in left or right ‘handed’ forms depending on how they twist. This twisting, called chirality, is crucial to understand because it changes the way a molecule behaves, for example within our bodies.

Scientists can study chiral molecules using particular laser light, which itself twists as it travels. Such studies get especially difficult for small amounts of molecules. This is where the minuscule gold springs can be helpful. Their shape twists the light and could better fit it to the molecules, making it easier to detect minute amounts.

Using some of the smallest springs ever created, the researchers from the University of Bath Department of Physics, working with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, examined how effective the gold springs could be at enhancing interactions between light and chiral molecules. They based their study on a colour-conversion method for light, known as Second Harmonic Generation (SHG), whereby the better the performance of the spring, the more red laser light converts into blue laser light.

They found that the springs were indeed very promising but that how well they performed depended on the direction they were facing.

Physics PhD student David Hooper who is the first author of the study, said: “It is like using a kaleidoscope to look at a picture; the picture becomes distorted when you rotate the kaleidoscope. We need to minimise the distortion.”

In order to reduce the distortions, the team is now working on ways to optimise the springs, which are known as chiral nanostructures.

“Closely observing the chirality of molecules has lots of potential applications, for example it could help improve the design and purity of pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals, help develop motion controls for nanorobotics and miniaturise components in telecommunications,” said Dr Ventsislav Valev who led the study and the University of Bath research team.

Gold spring shaped coils help reveal information about chiral molecules. Credit Ventsi Valev.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Strong Rotational Anisotropies Affect Nonlinear Chiral Metamaterials by David C. Hooper, Andrew G. Mark, Christian Kuppe, Joel T. Collins, Peer Fischer, Ventsislav K. Valev. Advanced Materials DOI: 10.1002/adma.201605110  View/save citation First published: 31 January 2017

This is an open access paper.

Canada’s Nanorobotics Laboratory unveils its ‘medical interventional infrastructure’

Located at the Polytechnique Montréal (Canada), the Nanorobotics Laboratory has built a one-of-a-kind ‘medical interventional infrastructure’, the result of a $4.6M investment from various levels of government and from private enterprise.

Before getting to the news release, here’s a video featuring Prof. Sylvain Martel who discusses his work by referencing the movie, Fantastic Voyage. There are subtitles for those whose French fails them,

From an Aug. 24, 2016 Polytechnique Montréal news release (also on EurekAlert),

Fifty years to the day after the film Fantastic Voyage was first shown in theatres, the Polytechnique Montréal Nanorobotics Laboratory is unveiling a unique medical interventional infrastructure devoted to the fight against cancer. The outcome of 15 years of research conducted by Professor Sylvain Martel and his team, it enables microscopic nanorobotic agents to be guided through the vascular systems of living bodies, delivering drugs to targeted areas.

An action-packed 100,000-kilometre journey in the human body

Fantastic Voyage recounted the adventure of a team of researchers shrunk to microscopic size who, aboard a miniature submarine, travelled into a patient’s body to conduct a medical operation in a surgically inoperable area. This science fiction classic has now been eclipsed by procedures and protocols developed by Professor Martel’s multidisciplinary team comprising engineers, scientists and experts from several medical specialties working together on these projects that herald the future of medicine.

“Our work represents a new vision of cancer treatments, with our goal being to develop the most effective transportation systems for the delivery of therapeutic agents right to tumour cells, to areas unreachable by conventional treatments,” says Professor Martel, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Medical Nanorobotics and Director of the Polytechnique Montréal Nanorobotics Laboratory.

Conveying nanorobotic agents into the bloodstream to reach the targeted area right up to the tiniest capillaries without getting lost in this network stretching about 100,000 kilometres—two-and-a-half times the Earth’s circumference—is a scenario that has been turned into reality. This is an adventure-filled journey for these microscopic vehicles that must confront the powerful onslaught of arterial blood flow, the mazes of the vascular network and the narrowness of the capillaries—just like the film’s heroes!

“Doctors” invisible to the naked eye

To conduct this fantastic voyage, Professor Martel’s team is developing various procedures, often playing a pioneering role. These include navigating carriers just a fraction of the thickness of a hair through the arteries using a clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) platform, the first in the world to achieve this in a living organism, in 2006. This exploit was followed in 2011 by the guidance of drug-loaded micro-transporters into the liver of a rabbit.

Limits to the miniaturization of artificial nanorobots prevent them from penetrating the smallest blood vessels, however. For this, Professor Martel plans to have them play the role of Trojan horses, enclosing an “army” of special bacteria loaded with drugs that they will release at the edges of these small vessels.

Able to follow paths smaller than a red blood cell, these self-propelled bacteria move at high speed (200 microns per second, or 200 times their size per second). Once they are inside a tumour, they are able to naturally detect hypoxic (oxygen-starved) zones, which are the most active zones and the hardest to treat by conventional means, including radiotherapy, and then deliver the drug.

Professor Martel’s team has succeeded in using this procedure to administer therapeutic agents in colorectal tumours in mice, guiding them through a magnetic field. This has just been the subject of an article in the renowned journal Nature Nanotechnology, titled Magneto-gerotactic Bacteria Deliver Drug-containing Nanoliposomes to Tumour Hypoxic Regions. “This advanced procedure, which provides optimal targeting of a tumour while preserving surrounding healthy organs and tissue, unlike current chemotherapy or radiotherapy, heralds a new era in cancer treatment,” says Dr. Gerald Batist, Director of the McGill Centre for Translational Research in Cancer, based at the Jewish General Hospital, which is collaborating on the project.

Professor Martel’s projects also focus on the inaccessibility of certain parts of the body, such as the brain, to transporting agents. In 2015, his team also stood out by successfully opening a rat’s blood-brain barrier, temporarily and without damage, providing access to targeted areas of the brain. This feat was achieved through a slight rise in temperature caused by exposing nanoparticles to a radiofrequency field.

“At present, 98% of drug molecules cross the blood-brain barrier only with great difficulty,” notes Dr. Anne-Sophie Carret, a specialist in hematology-oncology at Montréal’s Centre hospitalier universitaire Sainte-Justine and one of the doctors collaborating on the project. “This means surgery is often the only way to treat some patients who have serious brain diseases. But certain tumours are inoperable because of their location. Radiation therapy, for its part, is not without medium- and long-term risk for the brain. This work therefore offers real hope to patients suffering from a brain tumour.”

Here’s who invested, how much they invested, and what the Nanorobotics Laboratory got for its money,

This new investment in the Nanorobotics Laboratory represents $4.6 million in infrastructure, with contributions of $1.85 million each from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and the Government of Québec. Companies including Siemens Canada and Mécanik have also made strategic contributions to the project. This laboratory now combines platforms to help develop medical protocols for transferring the procedures developed by Professor Martel to a
clinical setting.

The laboratory contains the following equipment:

  • a clinical MRI platform to navigate microscopic carriers directly into specific areas in the vascular system and for 3D visualization of these carriers in the body;
  • a specially-developed platform that generates the required magnetic field sequences to guide special bacteria loaded with therapeutic agents into tumours;
  • a robotic station (consisting of a robotized bed) for moving a patient from one platform to another;
  • a hyperthermia platform for temporary opening of the blood-brain barrier;
  • a mobile X-ray system;
  • a facility to increase the production of these cancer-fighting bacteria.

Sylvain Martel’s most recent work with nanorobotic agents (as cited in the news release) was featured here in an Aug. 16, 2016 post.

Nanotechnology and cybersecurity risks

Gregory Carpenter has written a gripping (albeit somewhat exaggerated) piece for Signal, a publication of the  Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) about cybersecurity issues and  nanomedicine endeavours. From Carpenter’s Jan. 1, 2016 article titled, When Lifesaving Technology Can Kill; The Cyber Edge,

The exciting advent of nanotechnology that has inspired disruptive and lifesaving medical advances is plagued by cybersecurity issues that could result in the deaths of people that these very same breakthroughs seek to heal. Unfortunately, nanorobotic technology has suffered from the same security oversights that afflict most other research and development programs.

Nanorobots, or small machines [or nanobots[, are vulnerable to exploitation just like other devices.

At the moment, the issue of cybersecurity exploitation is secondary to making nanobots, or nanorobots, dependably functional. As far as I’m aware, there is no such nanobot. Even nanoparticles meant to function as packages for drug delivery have not been perfected (see one of the controversies with nanomedicine drug delivery described in my Nov. 26, 2015 posting).

That said, Carpenter’s point about cybersecurity is well taken since security features are often overlooked in new technology. For example, automated banking machines (ABMs) had woefully poor (inadequate, almost nonexistent) security when they were first introduced.

Carpenter outlines some of the problems that could occur, assuming some of the latest research could be reliably  brought to market,

The U.S. military has joined the fray of nanorobotic experimentation, embarking on revolutionary research that could lead to a range of discoveries, from unraveling the secrets of how brains function to figuring out how to permanently purge bad memories. Academia is making amazing advances as well. Harnessing progress by Harvard scientists to move nanorobots within humans, researchers at the University of Montreal, Polytechnique Montreal and Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine are using mobile nanoparticles inside the human brain to open the blood-brain barrier, which protects the brain from toxins found in the circulatory system.

A different type of technology presents a risk similar to the nanoparticles scenario. A DARPA-funded program known as Restoring Active Memory (RAM) addresses post-traumatic stress disorder, attempting to overcome memory deficits by developing neuroprosthetics that bridge gaps in an injured brain. In short, scientists can wipe out a traumatic memory, and they hope to insert a new one—one the person has never actually experienced. Someone could relish the memory of a stroll along the French Riviera rather than a terrible firefight, even if he or she has never visited Europe.

As an individual receives a disruptive memory, a cyber criminal could manage to hack the controls. Breaches of the brain could become a reality, putting humans at risk of becoming zombie hosts [emphasis mine] for future virus deployments. …

At this point, the ‘zombie’ scenario Carpenter suggests seems a bit over-the-top but it does hearken to the roots of the zombie myth where the undead aren’t mindlessly searching for brains but are humans whose wills have been overcome. Mike Mariani in an Oct. 28, 2015 article for The Atlantic has presented a thought-provoking history of zombies,

… the zombie myth is far older and more rooted in history than the blinkered arc of American pop culture suggests. It first appeared in Haiti in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the country was known as Saint-Domingue and ruled by France, which hauled in African slaves to work on sugar plantations. Slavery in Saint-Domingue under the French was extremely brutal: Half of the slaves brought in from Africa were worked to death within a few years, which only led to the capture and import of more. In the hundreds of years since, the zombie myth has been widely appropriated by American pop culture in a way that whitewashes its origins—and turns the undead into a platform for escapist fantasy.

The original brains-eating fiend was a slave not to the flesh of others but to his own. The zombie archetype, as it appeared in Haiti and mirrored the inhumanity that existed there from 1625 to around 1800, was a projection of the African slaves’ relentless misery and subjugation. Haitian slaves believed that dying would release them back to lan guinée, literally Guinea, or Africa in general, a kind of afterlife where they could be free. Though suicide was common among slaves, those who took their own lives wouldn’t be allowed to return to lan guinée. Instead, they’d be condemned to skulk the Hispaniola plantations for eternity, an undead slave at once denied their own bodies and yet trapped inside them—a soulless zombie.

I recommend reading Mariani’s article although I do have one nit to pick. I can’t find a reference to brain-eating zombies until George Romero’s introduction of the concept in his movies. This Zombie Wikipedia entry seems to be in agreement with my understanding (if I’m wrong, please do let me know and, if possible, provide a link to the corrective text).

Getting back to Carpenter and cybersecurity with regard to nanomedicine, while his scenarios may seem a trifle extreme it’s precisely the kind of thinking you need when attempting to anticipate problems. I do wish he’d made clear that the technology still has a ways to go.

Canada has a nanotechnology industry? and an overview of the US situation

It’s always interesting to get some insight into how someone else sees the nanotechnology effort in Canada.

First, there have been two basic approaches internationally. Some countries have chosen to fund nanotechnology/nanoscience research through a national initiative/project/council/etc. Notably the US, the UK, China, and Russia, amongst others, have followed this model. For example, the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI)  (a type of hub for research, communication, and commercialization efforts) has been awarded a portion of the US budget every year since 2000. The money is then disbursed through the National Science Foundation.

Canada and its nanotechnology industry efforts

By contrast, Canada has no such line item in its national budget. There is a National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) but it is one of many institutes that help make up Canada’s National Research Council. I’m not sure if this is still true but when it was first founded, NINT was funded in part by the federal government and in part by the province of Alberta where it is located (specifically, in Edmonton at the University of Alberta). They claim the organization has grown since its early days although it looks like it’s been shrinking. Perhaps some organizational shuffles? In any event, support for the Canadian nanotechnology efforts are more provincial than federal. Alberta (NINT and other agencies) and Québec (NanoQuébec, a provincially funded nano effort) are the standouts, with Ontario (nano Ontario, a self-organized not-for-profit group) following closely. The scene in Canada has always seemed fragmented in comparison to the countries that have nanotechnology ‘hubs’.

Patrick Johnson in a Dec. 22, 2015 article for Geopolitical Monitor offers a view which provides an overview of nanotechnology in the US and Canada,  adds to the perspective offered here, and, at times, challenges it (Note: A link has been added),

The term ‘nanotechnology’ entered into the public vernacular quite suddenly around the turn of the century, right around the same time that, when announcing the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in 2001 [2000; see the American Association for the Advancement of Science webpage on Historical Trends in Federal R&D, scroll down to the National Nanotechnology Initiative and click on the Jpg or Excel links], President Bill Clinton declared that it would one day build materials stronger than steel, detect cancer at its inception, and store the vast records of the Library of Congress in a device the size of a sugar cube. The world of science fiction took matters even further. In his 2002 book Prey, Michael Creighton [Michael Crichton; see Wikipedia entry] wrote of a cloud of self-replicating nanorobots [also known as, nanobots or self-assemblers] that terrorize the good people of Nevada when a science experiment goes terribly wrong.

Back then the hype was palpable. Federal money was funneled to promising nanotech projects as not to fall behind in the race to master this new frontier of science. And industry analysts began to shoot for the moon in their projections. The National Science Foundation famously predicted that the nanotechnology industry would be worth $1 trillion by the year 2015.

Well here we are in 2015 and the nanotechnology market was worth around $26 billion in [sic] last year, and there hasn’t even been one case of a murderous swarm of nanomachines terrorizing the American heartland. [emphasis mine]

Is this a failure of vision? No. If anything it’s only a failure of timing.

The nanotechnology industry is still well on its way to accomplishing the goals set out at the founding of the NNI, goals which at the time sounded utterly quixotic, and this fact is increasingly being reflected in year-on-year growth numbers. In other words, nanotechnology is still a game-changer in global innovation, it’s just taking a little longer than first expected.

The Canadian Connection

Although the Canadian government is not among the world’s top spenders on nanotechnology research, the industry still represents a bright spot in the future of the Canadian economy. The public-private engine [emphasis mine] at the center of Canada’s nanotech industry, the National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT), was founded in 2001 with the stated goal of “increasing the competitiveness of Canadian companies; creating technology solutions to meet the needs of society; expanding training programs for researchers and entrepreneurs; and enhancing Canada’s stature in the world of nanotechnology.” This ambitious mandate that NINT set out for itself was to be accomplished over the course of two broad stages: first a ‘seeding’ phase of attracting promising personnel and coordinating basic research, and the then a ‘harvesting’ phase of putting the resulting nanotechnologies to the service of Canadian industry.

Recent developments in Canadian nanotechnology [emphasis mine] show that we have already entered that second stage where the concept of nanotechnology transitions from hopeful hypothetical to real-world economic driver

I’d dearly like to know which recent developments indicate Canada’s industry has entered a serious commercialization phase. (It’s one of the shortcomings of our effort that communication is not well supported.) As well, I’d like to know more about the  “… public-private engine at the center of Canada’s nanotech industry …” as Johnson seems to be referring to the NINT, which is jointly funded (I believe) by the federal government and the province of Alberta. There is no mention of private funding on their National Research Council webpage but it does include the University of Alberta as a major supporter.

I am intrigued and I hope there is more information to come.

US and its nanotechnology industry efforts

Dr. Ambika Bumb has written a Dec. 23, 2015 article for Tech Crunch which reflects on her experience as a researcher and entrepreneur in the context of the US NNI effort and includes a plea for future NNI funding [Note: One link added and one link removed],

Indeed, I am fortunate to be the CEO of a nanomedicine technology developer that extends the hands of doctors and scientists to the cellular and molecular level.

The first seeds of interest in bringing effective nano-tools into the hands of doctors and patients were planted in my mind when I did undergrad research at Georgia Tech.  That initial interest led to me pursuing a PhD at Oxford University to develop a tri-modal nanoparticle for imaging a variety of diseases ranging from cancers to autoimmune disorders.

My graduate research only served to increase my curiosity so I then did a pair of post-doctoral fellowships at the National Cancer Institute and the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.  When it seemed that I was a shoe-in for a life-long academic career, our technology garnered much attention and I found myself in the Bay Area founding the now award-winning Bikanta [bikanta.com].

Through the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) and Nanotechnology Research and Development Act of 2003, our federal government has invested $20 billion in nanoresearch in the past 13 years.  The return on that investment has resulted in 628 agency‐to‐agency collaborations, hundreds of thousands of publications, and more than $1 trillion in revenue generated from nano‐enabled products. [emphasis mine]

Given that medical innovations take a minimum of 10 years before they translate into a clinical product, already realizing a 50X return is an astounding achievement.  Slowing down would be counter-intuitive from an academic and business perspective.

Yet, that is what is happening.  Federal funding peaked half a decade ago in 2010.  [emphasis mine] NNI investments went from $1.58B in 2010 to $1.170B in 2015 (in constant dollars), a 26% drop.  The number of nano-related papers published in the US were roughly 25 thousand in 2013, while the EU and China produced 33 and 35 thousand, respectively.

History has shown repeatedly how the United States has lost an early competitive advantage in developing high‐value technologies to international competition when commercialization infrastructure was not adequately supported.

Examples include semiconductors, advanced batteries for vehicles, and cement‐based construction materials, all of which were originally developed in the United States, but are now manufactured elsewhere.

It is now time for a second era – NNI 2.0.  A return to higher and sustained investment, the purpose of NNI 2.0 should be not just foundational research but also necessary support for rapid commercialization of nanotechnology. The translation of bench science into commercial reality requires the partnership of academic, industrial, federal, and philanthropic players.

I’m not sure why there’s a difference between Johnson’s ” … worth around $26 billion in [sic] last year …] and Bumb’s “… return on that investment has resulted … more than $1 trillion in revenue generated from nano‐enabled products.” I do know there is some controversy as to what should or should not be included when estimating the value of the ‘nanotechnology enterprise’, for example, products that are only possible due to nanotechnology as opposed to products that already existed, such as golf clubs, but are enhanced by nanotechnology.

Bumb goes on to provide a specific example from her own experience to support the plea,

When I moved from the renowned NIH [US National Institutes of Health] on the east coast to the west coast to start Bikanta, one of the highest priority concerns was how we were going to develop nanodiamond technology without access to high-end characterization instrumentation to analyze the quality of our material.  Purchasing all that equipment was not financially viable or even wise for a startup.

We were extremely lucky because our proposal was accepted by the Molecular Foundry, one of five DOE [US Department of Energy]-funded nanoscience user facilities.  While the Foundry primarily facilitates basic nanoscience projects from academic and national laboratory users, Fortune 500 companies and startups like ours also take advantage of its capabilities to answer fundamental questions and conduct proof of concept studies (~10%).

Disregarding the dynamic intellectual community for a minute, there is probably more than $150M worth of instrumentation at the Foundry.  An early startup would never be able to dream of raising a first round that large.

One of the factors of Bikanta’s success is that the Molecular Foundry enabled us to make tremendous strides in R&D in just months instead of years.  More user facilities, incubator centers, and funding for commercializing nanotech are greatly needed.

Final comments

I have to thank Dr. Bumb for pointing out that 2010 was the peak for NNI funding (see the American Association for the Advancement of Science webpage on Historical Trends in Federal R&D, scroll down to the National Nanotechnology Initiative and click on the Jpg or Excel links). I erroneously believed (although I don’t appear to have written up my belief; if you find any such statement, please let me know so I can correct it) that the 2015 US budget was the first time the NNI experienced a drop in funding.

While I found Johnson’s article interesting I wasn’t able to determine the source for his numbers and some of his material had errors that can be identified immediately, e.g., Michael Creighton instead of Michael Crichton.

Science and the movies (Bond’s Spectre and The Martian)

There’s some nanotechnology in the new James Bond movie, Spectre, according to Johnny Brayson in his Nov. 5, 2015 (?) article for Bustle (Note: A link has been removed),

James Bond has always been known for his gadgets, and although Daniel Craig’s version of the character has been considerably less doohickey-heavy than past iterations, he’s still managed to make use of a few over the years, from his in-car defibrillator in Casino Royale to his biometric-coded gun in Skyfall. But Spectre, the newest Bond film, changes up the formula and brings more gadgets than fans have seen in years. There are returning favorites like a tricked out Aston Martin and an exploding watch, but there’s also a new twist on an old gadget that allows Bond to be tracked by his bosses, an injected microchip that records his every move. …

To Bond fans, though, the technology isn’t totally new. In Casino Royale, Bond is injected with a microchip that tracks his location and monitors his vital signs. However, when he’s captured by the bad guys, the device is cut out of his arm, rendering it useless. MI6 seems to have learned their lesson in Spectre, because this time around Bond is injected with Smart Blood, consisting of nanotechnology that does the same thing while flowing microscopically through his veins. As for whether it could really happen, the answer is not yet, but someday it could be.

Brayson provides an introduction to some of the exciting developments taking place scientifically in an intriguing way by relating those developments to a James Bond movie. Unfortunately, some of  his details  are wrong. For example, he is describing a single microchip introduced subcutaneously (under the skin) synonymously with ‘smart blood’ which would be many, many microchips prowling your bloodstream.

So, enjoy the article but exercise some caution. For example, this part in his article is mostly right (Note: Links have been removed),

However, there does actually exist nanotechnology that has been safely inserted into a human body — just not for the purposes of tracking.  Some “nanobots”, microscopic robots, have been used within the human eye to deliver drugs directly to the area that needs them [emphasis mine], and the idea is that one day similar nanobots will be able to be injected into one’s bloodstream to administer medication or even perform surgery. Some scientists even believe that a swarm of nanobots in the bloodstream could eventually make humans immune to disease, as the bots would simply destroy or fix any issues as soon as they arrive.

According to a Jan. 30, 2015 article by Jacopo Prisco for CNN, scientists at ETH Zurich were planning to start human clinical trials to test ‘micro or nanobots’ in the human eye. I cannot find any additional information about the proposed trials. Similarly, Israeli researcher Ido Bachelet announced a clinical trial of DNA nanobots on one patient to cure their leukemia (my Jan. 7, 2015 posting). An unsuccessful attempt to get updated information can found in a May 2015 Reddit Futurology posting.

The Martian

That film has been doing very well and, for the most part, seems to have gotten kudos for its science. However for those who like to dig down for more iinformation, Jeffrey Kluger’s Sept. 30, 2015 article for Time magazine expresses some reservations about the science while enthusing over its quality as a film,

… Go see The Martian. But still: Don’t expect all of the science to be what it should be. The hard part about good science fiction has always been the fiction part. How many liberties can you take and how big should they be before you lose credibility? In the case of The Martian, the answer is mixed.

The story’s least honest device is also its most important one: the massive windstorm that sweeps astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) away, causing his crew mates to abandon him on the planet, assuming he has been killed. That sets the entire castaway tale into motion, but on a false note, because while Mars does have winds, its atmosphere is barely 1% of the density of Earth’s, meaning it could never whip up anything like the fury it does in the story.

“I needed a way to force the astronauts off the planet, so I allowed myself some leeway,” Weir conceded in a statement accompanying the movie’s release. …

It was exceedingly cool actually, and for that reason Weir’s liberty could almost be forgiven, but then the story tries to have it both ways with the same bit of science. When a pressure leak causes an entire pod on Watney’s habitat to blow up, he patches a yawning opening in what’s left of the dwelling with plastic tarp and duct tape. That might actually be enough to do the job in the tenuous atmosphere that does exist on Mars. But in the violent one Weir invents for his story, the fix wouldn’t last a day.

There’s more to this entertaining and educational article including embedded images and a video.

I sing the body cyber: two projects funded by the US National Science Foundation

Points to anyone who recognized the reference to Walt Whitman’s poem, “I sing the body electric,” from his classic collection, Leaves of Grass (1867 edition; h/t Wikipedia entry). I wonder if the cyber physical systems (CPS) work being funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US will occasion poetry too.

More practically, a May 15, 2015 news item on Nanowerk, describes two cyber physical systems (CPS) research projects newly funded by the NSF,

Today [May 12, 2015] the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced two, five-year, center-scale awards totaling $8.75 million to advance the state-of-the-art in medical and cyber-physical systems (CPS).

One project will develop “Cyberheart”–a platform for virtual, patient-specific human heart models and associated device therapies that can be used to improve and accelerate medical-device development and testing. The other project will combine teams of microrobots with synthetic cells to perform functions that may one day lead to tissue and organ re-generation.

CPS are engineered systems that are built from, and depend upon, the seamless integration of computation and physical components. Often called the “Internet of Things,” CPS enable capabilities that go beyond the embedded systems of today.

“NSF has been a leader in supporting research in cyber-physical systems, which has provided a foundation for putting the ‘smart’ in health, transportation, energy and infrastructure systems,” said Jim Kurose, head of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at NSF. “We look forward to the results of these two new awards, which paint a new and compelling vision for what’s possible for smart health.”

Cyber-physical systems have the potential to benefit many sectors of our society, including healthcare. While advances in sensors and wearable devices have the capacity to improve aspects of medical care, from disease prevention to emergency response, and synthetic biology and robotics hold the promise of regenerating and maintaining the body in radical new ways, little is known about how advances in CPS can integrate these technologies to improve health outcomes.

These new NSF-funded projects will investigate two very different ways that CPS can be used in the biological and medical realms.

A May 12, 2015 NSF news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the two CPS projects,

Bio-CPS for engineering living cells

A team of leading computer scientists, roboticists and biologists from Boston University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT have come together to develop a system that combines the capabilities of nano-scale robots with specially designed synthetic organisms. Together, they believe this hybrid “bio-CPS” will be capable of performing heretofore impossible functions, from microscopic assembly to cell sensing within the body.

“We bring together synthetic biology and micron-scale robotics to engineer the emergence of desired behaviors in populations of bacterial and mammalian cells,” said Calin Belta, a professor of mechanical engineering, systems engineering and bioinformatics at Boston University and principal investigator on the project. “This project will impact several application areas ranging from tissue engineering to drug development.”

The project builds on previous research by each team member in diverse disciplines and early proof-of-concept designs of bio-CPS. According to the team, the research is also driven by recent advances in the emerging field of synthetic biology, in particular the ability to rapidly incorporate new capabilities into simple cells. Researchers so far have not been able to control and coordinate the behavior of synthetic cells in isolation, but the introduction of microrobots that can be externally controlled may be transformative.

In this new project, the team will focus on bio-CPS with the ability to sense, transport and work together. As a demonstration of their idea, they will develop teams of synthetic cell/microrobot hybrids capable of constructing a complex, fabric-like surface.

Vijay Kumar (University of Pennsylvania), Ron Weiss (MIT), and Douglas Densmore (BU) are co-investigators of the project.

Medical-CPS and the ‘Cyberheart’

CPS such as wearable sensors and implantable devices are already being used to assess health, improve quality of life, provide cost-effective care and potentially speed up disease diagnosis and prevention. [emphasis mine]

Extending these efforts, researchers from seven leading universities and centers are working together to develop far more realistic cardiac and device models than currently exist. This so-called “Cyberheart” platform can be used to test and validate medical devices faster and at a far lower cost than existing methods. CyberHeart also can be used to design safe, patient-specific device therapies, thereby lowering the risk to the patient.

“Innovative ‘virtual’ design methodologies for implantable cardiac medical devices will speed device development and yield safer, more effective devices and device-based therapies, than is currently possible,” said Scott Smolka, a professor of computer science at Stony Brook University and one of the principal investigators on the award.

The group’s approach combines patient-specific computational models of heart dynamics with advanced mathematical techniques for analyzing how these models interact with medical devices. The analytical techniques can be used to detect potential flaws in device behavior early on during the device-design phase, before animal and human trials begin. They also can be used in a clinical setting to optimize device settings on a patient-by-patient basis before devices are implanted.

“We believe that our coordinated, multi-disciplinary approach, which balances theoretical, experimental and practical concerns, will yield transformational results in medical-device design and foundations of cyber-physical system verification,” Smolka said.

The team will develop virtual device models which can be coupled together with virtual heart models to realize a full virtual development platform that can be subjected to computational analysis and simulation techniques. Moreover, they are working with experimentalists who will study the behavior of virtual and actual devices on animals’ hearts.

Co-investigators on the project include Edmund Clarke (Carnegie Mellon University), Elizabeth Cherry (Rochester Institute of Technology), W. Rance Cleaveland (University of Maryland), Flavio Fenton (Georgia Tech), Rahul Mangharam (University of Pennsylvania), Arnab Ray (Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering [Germany]) and James Glimm and Radu Grosu (Stony Brook University). Richard A. Gray of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is another key contributor.

It is fascinating to observe how terminology is shifting from pacemakers and deep brain stimulators as implants to “CPS such as wearable sensors and implantable devices … .” A new category has been created, CPS, which conjoins medical devices with other sensing devices such as wearable fitness monitors found in the consumer market. I imagine it’s an attempt to quell fears about injecting strange things into or adding strange things to your body—microrobots and nanorobots partially derived from synthetic biology research which are “… capable of performing heretofore impossible functions, from microscopic assembly to cell sensing within the body.” They’ve also sneaked in a reference to synthetic biology, an area of research where some concerns have been expressed, from my March 19, 2013 post about a poll and synthetic biology concerns,

In our latest survey, conducted in January 2013, three-fourths of respondents say they have heard little or nothing about synthetic biology, a level consistent with that measured in 2010. While initial impressions about the science are largely undefined, these feelings do not necessarily become more positive as respondents learn more. The public has mixed reactions to specific synthetic biology applications, and almost one-third of respondents favor a ban “on synthetic biology research until we better understand its implications and risks,” while 61 percent think the science should move forward.

I imagine that for scientists, 61% in favour of more research is not particularly comforting given how easily and quickly public opinion can shift.