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Intervention at molecular scale: DNA origami devices, steered microrobots, and the long distance between design studies and machines.
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Engineered substitutes for the oxygen-carrying function of blood, including haemoglobin carriers, perfluorocarbon emulsions and cultured red cells, none in general clinical use.
The use of DNA as a construction material rather than a carrier of genes, folding programmed sequences into nanoscale shapes, devices, and logic-gated containers.
American engineer who proposed molecular nanotechnology, wrote Engines of Creation and Nanosystems, and later worked on AI strategy at Oxford.
The scenario in which self-replicating nanomachines consume the biosphere, an idea introduced by Eric Drexler in 1986 and later disowned by him.
Four-component lipid vesicles that carry mRNA and other nucleic acids into cells, the delivery system behind mRNA vaccines and the first systemic in vivo CRISPR therapies.
Micrometre- to millimetre-scale devices steered through the body by external magnetic, acoustic, or biological means, demonstrated in animals and used clinically only as capsule endoscopes.
Proposed micron-scale machines that would circulate in the body and perform mechanical repair, a design tradition with no working device and several unsolved physical constraints.
A proposed machine that would build objects by positioning individual atoms, central to Drexler's nanotechnology programme and disputed by chemists since the 1990s.
Detection methods that read single molecules or use nanoscale labels, including liquid biopsy, multi-cancer blood tests, and nanopore sensing, together with their overdiagnosis costs.
A proposed class of millimetre-scale wireless implants powered and read out by ultrasound, intended to replace tethered electrode arrays with distributed untethered sensors.
Robert Freitas's 1998 design study for an artificial red blood cell built as a pressurised micron-scale gas tank, widely cited and never built.
American researcher whose Nanomedicine volumes set out detailed numerical designs for medical nanorobots, among them the respirocyte, none of which has been fabricated.
The engineering of carriers and conjugates that concentrate a drug where it is needed, a field whose clinical successes have come from chemistry rather than from nanoparticle targeting.