These Nanobots Can Swim Around a Wound and Kill Bacteria
upstart writes:
These Nanobots Can Swim Around a Wound and Kill Bacteria:
[...] It turns out, the nanobots are among us. For over a decade, Samuel Sanchez, a chemist with the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, in Barcelona, has been envisioning nanobots that could carry useful payloads, like cancer drugs or antibiotics, through the body's viscous fluids.
Picture a spherical particle of silica, which functions as a chassis. Sanchez has shown that you can dot its surface with a mess of special proteins that propel the particle through fluid, like little motors. His lab has experimented with different chassis, motors, and cargo. In research published in late April, they joined forces with antibiotics researchers. The team loaded silica nanobots with experimental antibiotics-including one derived from wasp venom-to treat infected wounds on mice. The nanobots, which were dropped onto one end of an infected wound, traveled through the skin to treat the entire area-the first report of nanobots killing bacteria in animals.
We see that the whole wound gets covered. The machines can actually travel around the wound and clear the infection as they go," says Cesar de la Fuente, a bioengineer at the University of Pennsylvania who led the project with Sanchez.
That matters, because drugs normally depend on diffusion, or the process of passively spreading through the body's fluids. If the most perfect antibiotic in the world can diffuse only as well as a brick in a tub of jelly-well, it's not perfect.
Journal Reference:
Xavier Arque et al., Autonomous Treatment of Bacterial Infections in Vivo Using Antimicrobial Micro- and Nanomotors, American Chemical Society, 2022 (DOI: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.1c11013)
Ana C. Hortelao et al., Enzyme-Powered Nanobots Enhance Anticancer Drug Delivery, 2017 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.201705086)
Ana C. Hortelao et al., Swarming behavior and in vivo monitoring of enzymatic nanomotors within the bladder, 2021 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abd2823)
Marcelo D. T. Torres et al., The wasp venom antimicrobial peptide polybia-CP and its synthetic derivatives display antiplasmodial and anticancer properties, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/btm2.10167)
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