Plenty of Room at the Bottom
Every second numerous biological, chemical and physical factors change at the nanoscale to maintain human health. Our systematic understanding of how these factors work and change at such a small scale has resulted in incredible advances in fundamental science and even generated various new disciplines such as nanotechnology and nanobiology. Five decades ago, Richard Feynman, in one of his famous lectures, “There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, foresighted that one-day atoms would be arranged individually and even used to manufacture tiny devices- this later became a famous bottom-up methodology to build microscopic items.
DNA nanorobots
To date, numerous items based on nanotechnology have already become a part of our daily lives, from nanosensors that can detect salmonella in our food packages to covid-19 vaccines; mRNA encapsulated lipid nanoparticles, to save billions of lives. Echoing the words of Richard Feynman, who once famously postulated that the key feature in biology is not just about writing the information but rather what we could do with it. At Nanovery, we are just doing that, using multiple pieces of DNA at the nanoscale as building blocks to create “nanobots, or nanorobots”, which are then programmed to detect molecular nucleic acid markers to either diagnose/monitor a specific disease or to assess the potential harm of the novel pharmaceuticals to human health.
From molecular signature to a visible signal
Besides, DNA is a much more powerful material than we are led to believe in textbooks: it can be synthesised in a lab, broken down into smaller pieces, and then “programmed and simulated” to work as a precise diagnostics tool used to diagnose the world’s deadliest disease, cancer. At Nanovery, we are experts in the engineering of the physical and chemical characteristics of DNA and translating them into novel custom-made nanorobots. Once the nanorobots are built, we add them to the liquid biopsy samples, which can be serum, urine, or cell-culture media. The result, which comes in a matter of minutes, produces a fluorescent signal detected by a conventional plate reader indicating the presence of the nucleic acid of interest.
Further reading
If you’re interested in learning more about this fascinating field, we recommend reading the following paper - we find it particularly insightful!
https://dna-robotics.eu/2021/11/29/the-perspective-for-nano-sized-dna-robots
Read also
We are a data driven company using DNA nanotechnology and AI to scale up testing of nucleic acids for powerful insights from valuable samples.