[HN Gopher] L.A. startup is building tiny injectable robots to a...
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L.A. startup is building tiny injectable robots to attack tumors
Author : thereare5lights
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-03-05 09:54 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| endisneigh wrote:
| If the robots are small enough isn't this just going back to
| pharmacology? What's the difference between a sufficiently tiny
| robot and a protein?
| [deleted]
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Control, as discussed in the article. You have to distribute a
| protein via diffusion through the blood. You can't drive it to
| the site of a tumor. Also, the robots are not that small.
| Grustaf wrote:
| It would be cool if you had magnetic proteins that you could
| steer. Or at least magnetically control the release of the
| medicine.
| mnemotronic wrote:
| And the globalist conspiracy theory websites go crazy...
| vmception wrote:
| I've been approaching this wrong, is that a profitable
| audience? It seems like a fairly easy funnel since almost
| everyone is susceptible.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/QzHCi
| Grustaf wrote:
| These are quite large though, why wouldn't it work with say a
| long needle instead? I was imagining these robots to be small as
| cells!
| iamben wrote:
| Robots really seems the wrong word here, after reading about the
| magnets. Especially with the whole anti-vaxxers "Bill Gates is
| injecting nanobots in my Covid vaccine" rubbish that's
| perpetually doing the rounds on social media of late.
|
| Edit: it's very cool though!
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I recall seeing early trials on horse / pigs cadavers at a
| robotics conf. The robot is actuated / steered externally using a
| closed-loop MRI imager and magnetic field steering. So, the
| "robot" isn't exactly miniature if you count all that. Just the
| end effector, which is a small blob of metal and plasticy stuff.
| Still, really cool.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Sounds a bit like a magnetic mixer you see in a lab.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I'm surprised you can't get them for the kitchen. I guess the
| torque is probably crap, but still.
| refurb wrote:
| Yup. Anything bigger than 500mL or anything more vicious
| than a water solution gets an overhead stirred in the lab.
|
| Magnetic stirrers are great for small scale or even larger
| scale if it's just mixing water with acid (for example),
| but they stop working well after that.
| djrogers wrote:
| You can - look for a hot chocolate mixing mug or magnetic
| mixing mug on {large retail site}. Gave my son one for
| Christmas a few years ago cuz he's a nerd like me and
| adores hot chocolate. He loves the thing!
| pengaru wrote:
| Is that the same as a frother? I've seen a streamer use
| one on-stream a few times for making frothed chai tea,
| and it uses a magnetic coupler...
| delecti wrote:
| Yeah, I think most "solutions" in the kitchen are far too
| concentrated. I wouldn't expect a stirring bar to do much
| for stirring dough or any but the thinnest batters.
| burmer wrote:
| Homebrewers use them, for yeast culturing or making
| starters. I guess that's fairly lab-like, but they do it in
| kitchens.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Lab-
| Stirrers/b?ie=UTF8&node=318023011
| bredren wrote:
| I've had this vision of a set of tiny robots that live in your
| stomach and perform some amount of pre-processing of the foods
| you eat.
|
| They would do things like cut food into smaller pieces using
| small crab-like arms, digest and render inert sugars that are
| well beyond what your body needs and detect if you've eaten
| something that is rotten.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" digest and render inert sugars that are well beyond what
| your body needs"_
|
| I wonder what the ethical discussion for that looks like,
| though I guess we already have Orlistat to flush out ingested
| fat.
| bredren wrote:
| It sure doesn't reflect well on self-restraint.
|
| One way to look at it is as taking the conveniences that
| promote "quality of life" further along the path toward some
| yet-to-be-determined limit.
|
| If people could eat and not only worry less about the
| consequences, but also experience less of the consequences
| the majority would.
|
| That said, these "stombots" wouldn't only be for people who
| want to eat double-ice cream sundays occasionally.
|
| If enough sugars could be broken down in the stomach--before
| they enter the blood stream, it could help manage type 2
| diabetes upstream.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I'm not sure that "Our digestive systems are too inefficient"
| is the most important health problem to solve. If anything, in
| general our digestive systems appear to be _too_ efficient to
| optimize the health outcomes of diets in the developed world.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Our digestive systems? They suck.
|
| Part of the problem of our intelligence is that we adapted
| our environments to us instead of the other way around. Cats
| can eat an all-meat diet. Dogs can do fine on rice and meat.
|
| Why?
|
| It's because their bodies produce the vitamins they need to
| survive. We created agriculture and had such rich diets that
| when we lost our ability to create certain vitamins in our
| own bodies, we never even noticed. The genes are still there,
| they're just broken.
|
| "Fixing" that issue would be one of the greatest feats in the
| history of humanity. If mankind ever wants to leave this rock
| and colonize other worlds, they better figure out how to fix
| that problem. Would suck to have a starship travelling for
| hundreds of years only to land on a planet suitable for
| colonization and realize you ran out of Vitamin C so everyone
| is going to die of scurvy.
| wbc wrote:
| Are you saying agriculture cause humans to lose the ability
| to create vitamins (specifically C)? I don't think that is
| true, at least according to Nature:
|
| https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-mystery-of-
| vit...
|
| The article posits the loss of Vitamin C to be much
| earlier:
|
| Notably, not only all humans, but also gorillas, chimps,
| orangutans, and some monkeys have this inborn genetic flaw,
| meaning that the loss of vitamin C biosynthesis must have
| occurred first in one of our primate ancestors.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Guinea pigs also lost the ability to manufacture Vitamin C;
| it's hard to blame that on their development of
| agriculture.
|
| It's also not necessary to eat a rich diet to maintain
| levels of Vitamin C. Everything alive contains it. (Even
| the guinea pigs.) The things that suppress it are probably
| things you would associate with "rich food", like cooking
| and long storage periods. Eat one onion and you'll get far
| more Vitamin C than you need.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Why?
|
| None of that.
|
| Cats are obligate carnivores, their bodies don't produce
| taurine.
|
| And all animals need to eat _something_ because none of us
| are photovores.
|
| And some plants are carnivores.
|
| If we colonise other worlds, rather than O'Neill habitats
| or mind uploads, we're almost certainly taking the farms
| with us for the trip, not rely on local stuff.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| And, our metabolism depends on Vitamin B12, which is ONLY
| made by bacteria. Every plant and animal that needs B12
| has to get it by eating something else with B12 in it, or
| having the bacteria responsible in it's digestive tract.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm not sure fixing it would be good. Genetics is tricky,
| and we don't know what we would lose by fixing that gene.
| Loss of intelligence is one trade off I've seen suggested,
| but I don't know what would really happen.
| mhh__ wrote:
| This is something I wonder about quite a lot. If we had a way
| of eating food but knowing it was basically just culinary
| masturbation so to speak (i.e. no nutrients beyond what is safe
| or thin), would we still eat like we do - I'm not particularly
| prone to comfort eating, but the psychology behind these things
| is fascinating and I would wager the answer is probably no (and
| would probably be deeply immoral given that some people starve)
| lowdanie wrote:
| In some sense you have described our microbiome :)
| efficax wrote:
| What could go wrong
| space_ghost wrote:
| It didn't go well on that episode of The Outer Limits. John-Boy
| Walton grew eyes in the back of his head.
| D-Coder wrote:
| That sounds like a plus. :-)
| thereisnospork wrote:
| When the alternative is terminal cancer not much.
| tyingq wrote:
| Robots seems like the wrong word, which seems a comfort in the
| this case. They mention that both moving it around, and
| activating the plunger is done via magnetic fields from outside
| the body. It actually sounds relatively "low tech", which perhaps
| means faster to approval.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| They're really just "objects". The real robot is the thing
| outside the body controlling the "objects".
| greesil wrote:
| An object killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
| Sometimes it helps to have a sense of scale on how things are
| worded. Also, marketing.
| coldcode wrote:
| Star Trek called them nanites.
| space_ghost wrote:
| Also "Nanoprobes."
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Nanites are tiny robots though and not moved by outside
| forces like the thing described by the article.
| andi999 wrote:
| I like the ones needing outside forces much better.
| reaperducer wrote:
| As did Mystery Science Theater 3000. I wonder if it's a more
| generic term than I realized.
|
| https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/The_Nanites
| tyingq wrote:
| Was curious about this also. "Brave new words" (Jeff
| Prucher) says the Star Trek reference was probably the
| earliest. Here's a screenshot from the book:
| https://imgur.com/a/UPahc1w
| fumar wrote:
| I lost my sister to a glioma a few years back. I've always known
| that eventually better treatments would become available, but
| this is novel and not something I envisioned. I hope it works and
| saves children who have these brain tumors.
| joedevon wrote:
| My condolences :(
| topynate wrote:
| Interesting that the size of the devices is limited by imaging
| technology rather than the ability to fabricate smaller ones. I
| guess the trade-off is that imaging small things with X-rays
| requires more ionizing radiation.
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