Robots Made From DNA Could One Day Transport Medicine Inside Your Body

A CalTech research team headed by Anupama Thubagere and Lulu Qian has built robots from DNA, and programmed them to bring individual molecules to a designated location.

Eventually, this technology could be used to transport molecules of many types throughout the body — which could potentially transform everything from drug delivery to how the body fights infections to how microscopic measurements are made.

There are currently three emerging fields within DNA nanoscience, the science of creating molecular-sized devices out of DNA: The self-assembly of nanostructures from DNA strands; molecular computation and data storage; and DNA robotics.

The central premise of DNA nanoscience is that, rather than creating molecular devices or systems from scratch, we can leverage the power of nature, which has already figured much of this out.

If and when we finally master molecular machinery, we'll be able to build microscopic-sized robots with programmable functions and send them to places that are otherwise impossible to reach, such as a cell or a hard-to-reach cancerous tumour.

UCJ, UNILORIN.