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Motorized Molecules Drill through and Destroy Cancer Cells

Rice University  engineers have constructed nanomachines to deliver drugs and destroy diseased cells. The motorized molecules are driven by light, and have been used to drill holes in the membranes of individual cells and show promise for either bringing therapeutic agents into the cells or directly inducing the cells to die. The researchers predict that the nanomachines will help target cancers like breast tumors and melanomas that resist existing chemotherapy.

Topics:
Drug Delivery Medical Motion Control

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 what we did is we started with nanomachines we've been investigating nanomachines for several years particularly mental cars which we've made previously where we had four wheels and a chassis and then we built motorized nano cars that had these little motors that could push them along a surface and more recently what we did is we built something analogous to a

    00:00:23 nano submarine where we could have the motor rotate when we shine a light on it and the motor rotates at two to three million rotations per second when a light shines on it and we could propel it in solution now these molecular motors and the molecular nano machines are really quite small we can park about 50,000 of them across the diameter of a human hair and so what we've done in

    00:00:50 this study is we've shown that we can drill into cells human cells or animal cells we can drill into them using these nano machines so the nano machines will attach to the surface and then a light will be shone upon them and they will drill right into the cell as a microscope is the resolution of anything which we can see is limited by the the light which we use to excite and

    00:01:16 conditioned eyes things and the optical quality which we call the refractive index and the numerical aperture of the system which is a constant number and in this case what we use in our microscope we are capable to see things in resolution of 60 by 60 nano meter which is incredibly small and what allows us to see in this video that there are two cells which are having surrounded by the

    00:01:38 DS nano machines so when you look at the cells you see this wonderful green network which is the mitochondrial Network and the UV excitation unless UV is also violet light actually also excited a nanomachine so as we see the video these nano machines are drilling through the cell drilling small holes allowing this this dives for PDI Edyta games to get incorporated into the cells

    00:01:59 that binds to the fragmented DNA s which is one of the signs of necrotic cell death which means the cell there's no point turning back the cell is already that for many years I never had envisioned the nanomachines being used medically I thought they were way too small because they're much much smaller than a cell in other words it would take thousands of

    00:02:19 these to go around the circumference of a cell but now this work has really changed my thoughts on this and I think that therapeutically this will be a whole new way to treat patients using nano machines and this is going to be an excellent application for cancer treatment and much broader not just for the killing of cells but for the treatment of cells being able to

    00:02:42 interact with the human body using molecular machines [Music] you