Health, Technology and Society

Nanobots

2 Comments

…bloodstream nanobots.

Eric Drexler foresaw this sort of thing three decades ago. It’s just the beginning.

[Update a while later]

Biotech’s potential new cancer cure:

Newly marketed drugs called checkpoint inhibitors are curing a small percentage of skin and lung cancers, once hopeless cases. More than 60,000 people have been treated with these drugs, which are sold by Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb. The treatments work by removing molecular brakes that normally keep the body’s T cells from seeing cancer as an enemy, and they have helped demonstrate that the immune system is capable of destroying cancer.

Faster, please.

2 thoughts on “Nanobots”

  1. When I asked him about the T-cell treatments, he said it was too soon to guess at a price. It depends how well they work and how hard they are to make. “There’s no model for how much it costs,” he said. “But remember, we get to utter words like ‘cure.’ And at this point, it’s a single dose.”

    The article was amazing, but these last three sentences really got me. I can’t recall a news story that choked me up, positively, in this way.

  2. I’ve been following the checkpoint inhibitors for a while. The news from the clinical trials has been amazing: some trials have been stopped early due to efficacy (that is, the results were so good it would have been unethical to continue giving the control group the placebo.) This is rare, and very very welcome, in a drug trial.

    In at least one case, a woman with advanced cancer had the tumors die back so quickly she had a problem with the open cavities they left behind.

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