We've all been sick at one point or another, but what if I told you that tiny microscopic machines could be injected into your bloodstream and could fight the infection just as effectively as any antibiotic? That's right, you know them, you love them, it's nanomachines, son!
Before I can start talking about nanomachines though, let me explain why they are a useful tool. In this specific case, how they could help us fight growing antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about bacterial viruses rapidly developing resistance to available antibiotics, while the production of new antibiotics has been extremely hampered, to say the least. This is a serious problem because these bacterial viruses could become immune to all available antibiotics as soon as 2050, which would lead to many deaths due to the viruses and other bacterial infections. With that information being known, it is unsurprising that other solutions are being posited to assist in counteracting antibiotic resistance, which is where nanomachines come in.
Nanomachines are well, you guessed it! Nano. Like, a piece of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick, meaning you could potentially stack 100,000 nanomachines on top of each other to get the same thickness as a piece of paper. Yeah, they are incomprehensibly small.
Now, how can these machines help fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria? The idea is that the nanomachines essentially burrow into the cellular membrane of an antibiotic-resistant bacterial cell and pierce it, killing the bacterial cell. The bacterial cell can't grow resistant to what is essentially a drill, so that shouldn't be a problem.
The prospect of this technology led scientists from Rice University to study the use of nanomachines on several different viruses such as E. coli, A. baumannii, and S. aureus. These machines had their drills set at different speeds to test their effectiveness on the viruses. Unsurprisingly, the faster the drill speed, the easier it pierces the membranes of the viruses, and thus is better at killing viruses. Usually killing the viral cells in minutes. That being said, the slower drills could still kill the viral cell provided an antibiotic payload was added to the nanomachine to assist in killing the viral cells.
The only real problem is getting energy to the machines. The machines do contain generators for an internal power source when inside the body, usually by using electrolytes in the bloodstream. However, usually nanomachines are given light pulses from an external power source before they are injected in to the body, running on
405 nanometers of light, which is on
the violet-blue part of the light
spectrum.
This is great for use on the surface of the human body or layers of the body closer to the surface, but scientists are looking for a new energy source to allow the nanomachines to be inserted deeper into the body. This has led to the interesting idea to use infrared light instead. It wouldn't provide as much energy to the machine, but it could transmit that energy to the machine much easier than the current system, allowing the nanomachines to travel deeper into the human body while still maintaining functionality.
All in all, though, nanomachines appear to be a promising avenue to counteracting antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the future. It will be interesting to see how this technology continues to progress.
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