Tag Archives: DNA nanobot

Surgical nanobots to be tested in humans in 2015?

Thanks to James Lewis at the Foresight Institute’s* blog and his Jan. 6, 2015 posting about an an announcement of human clinical trials for surgical nanobots (Note: Links have been removed),

… as structural DNA nanotechnology rapidly expanded the repertoire of atomically precise nanostructures that can be fabricated, it became possible to fabricate functional DNA nanostructures incorporating logic gates to deliver and release molecular cargo for medical applications, as we reported a couple years ago (DNA nanotechnology-based nanorobot delivers cell suicide message to cancer cells). More recently, DNA nanorobots have been coated with lipid to survive immune attack inside the body.

Lewis then notes this (Note: A link has been removed),

 … “Ido Bachelet announces 2015 human trial of DNA nanobots to fight cancer and soon to repair spinal cords“:

At the British Friends of Bar-Ilan University’s event in Otto Uomo October 2014 Professor Ido Bachelet announced the beginning of the human treatment with nanomedicine. He indicates DNA nanobots can currently identify cells in humans with 12 different types of cancer tumors.

A human patient with late stage leukemia will be given DNA nanobot treatment. Without the DNA nanobot treatment the patient would be expected to die in the summer of 2015. Based upon animal trials they expect to remove the cancer within one month.

The information was excerpted from Brian Wang’s Dec. 27, 2014 post on his Nextbigfuture blog,

One Trillion 50 nanometer nanobots in a syringe will be injected into people to perform cellular surgery.

The DNA nanobots have been tuned to not cause an immune response. They have been adjusted for different kinds of medical procedures. Procedures can be quick or ones that last many days.

Using DNA origami and molecular programming, they are reality. These nanobots can seek and kill cancer cells, mimic social insect behaviors, carry out logical operators like a computer in a living animal, and they can be controlled from an Xbox. Ido Bachelet from the bio-design lab at Bar Ilan University explains this technology and how it will change medicine in the near future.

I advise reading both Wang’s and Lewis’ posts in their entirety. To give you a sense of how their posts differ (Lewis is more technical), I solicited information from the websites hosting their blog postings.

Here’s more about Wang from the About page on the Nextbigfuture blog,

Brian L. Wang, M.B.A. is a long time futurist. A lecturer at the Singularity University and Nextbigfuture.com author. He worked on the most recent ten year plan for the Institute for the Future and at a two day Institute for the Future workshop with Universities and City planners in Hong Kong (advising the city of Hong Kong on their future plans). He had a TEDx lecture on Energy. Brian is available as a speaker for corporations and organizations that value accurate and detailed insight into the development of technology global trends.

Lewis provides a contrast (from the About page listing Lewis on the Foresight Institute website),

Jim received a B.A. in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, an M.A. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in chemistry, from Harvard University in 1972. After doing postdoctoral research at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research, Lausanne, Switzerland, from 1971-1973, Jim did research in the molecular biology of tumor viruses at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, from 1973-1980, first as a postdoctoral researcher, and then as a Staff Investigator and Senior Staff Investigator. He continued his research as an Associate Member, Basic Sciences Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, from 1980-1988, and then joined the Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute in Seattle, WA, as a Senior Research Investigator from 1988-1996. Since 1996 he has been working as a consultant on nanotechnology.

Getting back to Bachelet, his team’s work, a precursor for this latest initiative, has been featured here before in an April 11, 2014 post,

This latest cockroach item, which concerns new therapeutic approaches, comes from an April 8, 2014 article by Sarah Spickernell for New Scientist (Note: A link has been removed),

It’s a computer – inside a cockroach. Nano-sized entities made of DNA that are able to perform the same kind of logic operations as a silicon-based computer have been introduced into a living animal.

Ido Bachelet can be seen in this February 2014 video describing the proposed surgical nanobots,

Bar-Ilan University where Bachelet works is located in Israel. You can find more information about this work and more on the Research group for Bio-Design website.

*The possessive was moved from Foresight to Institute as in Institute’s on Nov. 11, 2015.