Darwin^X — Curing Cancer With Nanobots
Imagine being a Roman emperor 2000 years ago. You had an entire kingdom at your command, willing to do whatever you command. They all served you in some way. Each had their own task, gathering crops, cooking food, enforcing order, or defending your city and conquering others. All for the ultimate goal of keeping your kingdom healthy and prosperous. Wouldn’t it be great to have your own kingdom, with your own personal army, keeping it safe, healthy, and in order? Well in the near future, it may entirely be possible.
I’m not talking about an actual kingdom, or actual troops with hardhats, spears, shields and a loud battle cry. I’m talking about your own body, your own personal kingdom… and it’s currently vulnerable. From cancer to aging, to even the common cold, our body is constantly under threat.
What you need is an army to protect your kingdom. A miniature army. An army so small that you can’t even see it with your own eyes. But still, this army is no less than the army Roman emperors had 2000 years ago.
This army is an army of nanobots. Robots that are as small as red blood cells. Thousands of times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. Working together in swarms of millions, they can boost your immune system, fight diseases, and fix any cells that aren’t working properly. What if cancer became as curable as the common cold? What if aging was slowed or even reversed? This isn’t magic. This isn’t a distant dream. This is a close reality.
The state of nanobots today is similar to where computers were in the 1960s. Currently, there are human trials being done for the use of DNA nanobots. The goal is to replace surgery by injecting a trillion nanobots into the human body. They get to the site of disease, then open up, releasing a molecule that kills it.
Currently, this is all done through stochastic decision making, not intelligent decision making. This means that the robot is not making decisions based off of logic, but based off of probabilities. An example of this would be if you were at a conference, trying to optimize for the amount of people you could talk to that day. The way you would make your decision, is go towards the larger crowd of people, vs the smaller one. The nanobot makes similar decisions, guided chemically.
Once the nanobot reaches a certain condition about its environment (for example the concentration of virus cells), the change in the environment activates the latch mechanism of the nanobot, and releases a chemical that the nanobot was carrying that kills virus cells.
Futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, predict that nanobots could cure every disease, map the brain, and even allow us to live forever. Kurzweil thinks that by 2030, we will already have nanobots within us! While this may seem far fetched, our minds think linearly, while progress is in fact exponential. Innovations and progress happens at a faster and faster rate. We could actually have nanobots in our lifetime.
But why not now? Why don’t we already have our own personal armies today? The reason is that the design and creation of the nanobots is extremely expensive and complex, and tracking nanobots inside the human body is almost impossible!
The design process mainly involves designing a nanobot that we think might work, building it, then testing it. This process is very slow, very expensive, and so far hasn’t yielded any deployable nanobots.
We started Darwin^X to solve this problem. The solution is not a simple one — a simulation software combined with artificial intelligence. The software would be licensed out to pharmaceutical companies and universities, for them to use and create nanobots.
Think of your favorite game. It’s simulating its own physics and interactions within the game. Why not create a simulation of the microscopic level? Darwin^X plans to simulate the interactions of the nanobot with the microscopic world as it performs it’s given task.
That way, you would be able to track and test nanobots without needing to actually create them. The simulation allows the nanobot design to be iterated quickly to fix errors and make testing faster. You would be able to follow the nanobot on it’s journey to kill a cancer cell, or whatever bad guy they’re targeting in the simulation.
This way, when you actually create the nanobot, you will be close to certain that the nanobot will work!
Artificial intelligence will be used to automate the design process and make life on the design side a lot easier (I go much more in-depth about everything in the other article [link coming soon]. This is the big picture article). The final result? Catapulting the nanobot industry from cutting edge experiments to everyday procedures
The plan is to have the proof of concept ready by June of next year, a simple simulation with a nanobot that has a few variables acting on it.
From here, the sky’s the limit. We plan to have the simulation ready to be able to use for research and development by 2023–2024. We plan to scale up and improve it as time goes along, but this is when we plan the baseline model to be ready.
Then comes the part where Darwin^X won’t just be a platform for researchers and companies to test the designs they thought of, this is where it gets real.
First, artificial intelligence will be incorporated into the component design side of the platform, where it will help come up with the perfect material for the task at hand.
Then comes the crazy cool part.
With a combination of genetic and reinforcement learning algorithm iterations, we would also be able to possibly create nanobots, and model their behavior (more for bio-hybrids or artificial nanobots. All of this is explored in more depth in the other article [link coming soon]).
All you would need to do, is tell the simulation the task you want it to perform, and it would be able to come up with a fully functional simulated nanobot for that task!
Both creating the simulation, and integrating it with AI would be an immense task, with a lot of complexity, and unforeseeable complications. The major one that we can foresee is computational power, but we have thought of ways to get around that (other article). The truth is, that if the solutions existed we wouldn’t be doing anything new, or revolutionary.
Earlier I said the sky’s the limit… Well, I lied. This is a rocketship, headed for the stars. There’s a whole other side to the timeline that I hadn’t revealed up until this point.
By 2030, we hope to be at a point where the complexity of the simulation allows for hundreds of thousands of nanobots to be simulated as if they were in a real human body. In addition, there are projects going on that are trying to map the entire human body, cell by cell. If we could integrate something similar into the simulation, then the software could be used to simulate just about anything to do with the human body, not just nanobots!
Quantum computing is an alternate computing method to what we have today, that has the potential to be almost infinitely faster! Quantum computers (check out my articles on the topic to learn more) would provide more than enough computation to model complex interactions, and do machine learning with ease.
Once someone actually creates a design in our simulation, what do they do then? Ideally, in the future, the process will be super smooth. They design their nanobot, model the behavior, and send us the design file for us to 3D print. You heard me right. There is work being done on creating 3D nano-assemblers, so that we could literally print nanobot designs once they are made. A modern-day example of what I’m talking about is Nanoscribe, a company that manufactures 3D nano-printers.
Phew. Back to reality. Everything above is speculative for the future, but is based in reality and current trends. I’m not making some random stuff up and throwing it up there. This is actually what the future could look like. Check out our website at darwinx.ca, and contact us if you have any questions, or would like to chat. We also have a one-pager, linked on the website.
To close off, I’ll explain where Darwin^X came from.
Darwin: We are using evolutionary algorithms to create nanobots, natural selection is what Darwin is famous for
^X: The goal is to exponentially change the progress of the nanobot industry, hence the exponential at the end of Darwin^X
While this is a modern-day operating room:
With Darwin^X, this is an operating room of the future:
Thanks for reading!
Hey I’m Silen, and I‘m super excited to work on this project:
