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Technology has a habit of making things smaller, yet faster, more powerful and efficient than ever. Think of all the things technology has managed to shrink over the last decade or so.

Computers used to once take up an entire room and now we have devices in our palms, that are millions of times faster than those room-occupying computers.

This is possible thanks to miniaturisation. As technology advances, we are able to manufacture really, really tiny stuff. We are talking on the nanoscale here i.e. less than 100 nanometers. For reference, a human hair is about 75,000 nm in diameter!

That is really small and being able to manufacture on a nanoscale equips us with a lot of abilities that we can use to our benefits. Not only will this be a game changer in the fields of computer science, material science, energy storage, but it will revolutionise the medical field too.

The Rise of the Nanobots

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Nanobots are robots on the nanoscale that are so tiny that they are almost invisible to the naked eye. They are still not ready for mass market but when they will be, humans will have created the best tool that we will ever create.

Nanobots will not only be highly beneficial for the medical field but have applications elsewhere too, but in this post, I am going to talk about how they will help us save more lives than ever.

Applications of Nanobots

Targeted Drug Delivery

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Nanobots could be used to deliver drugs to specific cells in the body, like for example diseased cells or cancerous cells. This is a targeted medicine delivery system where the nanobots swim inside you until they find these cells and deliver drugs only to them.

This has huge implications. There are several drugs that can harm healthy cells or may have side effects on them (chemo drugs for example), but if the drugs were used only to treat the diseased cells, other healthy cells need not suffer.

Diagnostics

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Imagine a swarm of nanobots swimming inside you all the time, ready to take notice of any chemical changes inside you that might be a result of a disease and getting an alert on your smartwatch. This will allow for real time health tracking!

In the future, nanobots would be able to detect cancerous cells or any other viruses or bacteria in your body as soon as they attack, and it will lead to quick treatments that are simply not possible today.

Not only that, nanobots would be able to tell any other toxic chemicals that might get injected in the body and alert you in an instant. So many lives would be saved thanks to this real time information.

Fighting Diseases

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This might sound something straight out of science fiction but in the not so distant future, this will be very possible. Nanobots will one day swim along side your white blood cells and fight diseases together.

Nanobots could theoretically be programmed to fight any pathogen and destroy it before it even starts harming the body. If any new type of pathogens are discovered, the nanobots could be reprogrammed using a software downloaded from the internet!

I know this is too futuristic and sounds like something we’ll see way into the future but this might not take as long as you might think. This technology might very well be with us in just a decade!

Clearing Blocked Blood Vessels

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Another important area where nanobots will be of tremendous help will be clearing up people’s clogged blood vessels. We know that cardiovascular diseases are common killers in today’s world.

Blood vessels can get clogged by fat, cholesterol, calcium and other substances. This restricts the blood flow and causes a deprivation of oxygen in the vital organs of the body causing strokes and heart attacks.

Nanobots will be able to clear up these artery plaques and basically keep everything flowing. As such, they could serve as the janitors of our bodies.