A robot — 1,000 times smaller than human hair — could kill cancerous tumors
What if robots were the solution to cure cancer?
That’s what American and Chinese scientists have found out recently. They managed to destroy cancerous tumors with nanobots that cut off the blood supply needed for their development.
Creators of this DNA scale robotic system say that this is could be a major breakthrough that could be used in the treatment of several types of cancer. Without doing any harm to healthy cells, the robot can travel through the body’s blood stream and hunt tumors.
“This technology is a strategy that can be used for many types of cancer, since all solid tumor-feeding blood vessels are essentially the same,” says Hao Yan, who co-authored the study.
The technique used by this discovery is called the DNA origami. It consists of making structures from pieces of DNA. These pieces can bend in all kinds of shapes on a scale 1000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.
This technique promises to revolutionize medical treatments by creating nanoparticle-based treatments to diagnose or treat certain diseases.
It has yet to be tested on human.
