DNA Nanobots to Treat Disease in First Human Trial

Ido Bachelet of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University (and formerly of Harvard’s Wyss Institute) announced their human trial last year at the British Friends of Bar-Ilan University event. “No, no it’s not science fiction,” he said. “It’s already happening.”

In a 2012 Science paper, Bachelet and colleagues described a DNA nanobot shaped like a hexagonal tube, with its two halves connected by a latched hinge (pictured above). When the little device recognizes a target cell based on its surface proteins, the two halves swing open like a clam to deliver a tiny but deadly cargo of drugs or nanoparticles. These could be molecules that force cancer cells to self-destruct by interfering with their growth, for example. When the researchers released their tiny bots into a mixture of healthy and cancerous human blood cells, half of the cancer cells were destroyed within three days. No healthy cells were harmed.