It circulates throughout the body and attacks only cancer cells … ‘Nanorobot’ becomes a doctor[미래on] : ZUM News

[편집자주] Changes across technology, society, business and culture are accelerating. It is a phenomenon in which several factors, including industrial and cultural innovation and changes in social and demographic structures, are organically interconnected. To deal successfully with the future, we need the wisdom to determine the present and estimate the future. To this end, News 1 takes a look at the changes that are being felt around the world and looks at how they are changing from different angles through ‘Future on’.

Schematic diagram showing the size of the nanorobot clutch. (provided by IBS)

(Seoul = News 1) Reporter Jo Jae-hyun = It moves freely through the blood vessels and selects and kills only cancer cells. Prospects for ‘nanorobots’ to treat diseases are growing. Nanorobots are ‘nanometer’ (nm, 1 billionth of a meter) in size, which is difficult to see with the naked eye, but they have their own movement. Karolinska Institutet from Sweden introduced in a paper published in the international academic journal ‘Nature Nanotechnology’ last July that nanorobots reduced the growth of breast cancer tumors in mice by 70%. The research institute used ‘cell death receptors’ which can only cleanly remove specific cells without causing an inflammatory reaction.

In this case, the problem arises that normal cells, not cancer cells, are also destroyed. Accordingly, the laboratory designed a switch that hides cell death receptors in a nanostructure and that only works near cancer cells.

Usually, cancer cells consume too much oxygen and nutrients, so the area around the tumor is acidic. The research center took into account the fact that the acidity (pH) around the tumor is slightly acidic, between 5.6 and 6.8, and designed the so-called ‘weapon’ to be produced only in an environment pH 6.5 or lower.

The possibility of developing self-driving nanorobots that can be used for diagnosis or treatment also raises concerns.

Before that, a domestic research team succeeded in developing a nanorobot that can work independently to control the biological signals of cells when they detect a specific disease agent.

Jin-Woo Cheon, director of the Nanomedicine Research Center at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), developed a biological nanorobot equipped with an engine that operates the robot, a rotating body similar to a propeller (rotor), and clutch which he turns. on and off within a very good range of 200 nm in size, early this year.

The clutch only responds to specific genetic signals and, when needed, transmits a small force in units of ‘piconewton’ (pN, one trillionth of a newton) to the rotor to allow the engine to work.

This is a technology that can be applied to treat diseases by finding disease-causing genes and selectively activating or overwriting them without affecting normal genes . It can also be programmed to detect an almost unlimited number of disease agents.

It is encouraging that self-driving nanorobots will soon be used to improve diagnosis or treatment.

cho84@naisaistan1.kr

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