Researchers Demo 'Nanomotors' in Living Cells
Imagine nanobots operating inside your body, battling disease, stopping cancer in its tracks, and promoting your general health. It's a creepy but promising use of technology that has been a staple of science fiction in recent years—and now American scientists have brought it that much closer to reality.
Researchers at Penn State on Monday revealed that they have successfully inserted "nanomotors" inside live human cells, giving the team the ability to propel the cells with ultrasonic waves and steer them with magnets.
It's the first time this has been done, according to the research team, which spoke with Penn State's Eberly College of Science website this week and published in the latest edition of the Angewandte Chemie scientific journal. Previous versions of nanomotors capable of operating in liquids were not inserted into living cells because they were toxic, according to team leader Tom Mallouk, an Evan Pugh Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics at Penn State.
Mallouk and his team introduced "rocket-shaped metal particles" to human cervical cancer cells called HeLa cells, which ingested the particles. Using ultrasonic waves, the researchers were able to maneuver the particles inside the HeLa cells, causing them to "spring into action" as nanomotors, "moving around and bumping into organelles—structures within a cell that perform specific functions."
The process in these early stages sounds pretty violent. When activated, the nanomotors perform by "spinning and battering against organelles and the cell membrane," and can even be manipulated to puncture the membrane, the researchers said.
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