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hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm Aneeqa and in this episode i'm joined by Emma, Hara and Priyanka to talk about nanobots in medicine and what this has to do with james bond however before we start this is the last episode of the year uh so it's a bit of a celebration so i'm joined with our producer laura to kind of chat about the bit of a journey that
we've been on over the last nine months since we first started it's been such a fun journey anika i think i really have to thank you for essentially putting the team together in the beginning i didn't know anyone else in the podcasting team before we started this but i've learned so much from the people that we work with and it's led to so many new connections as well so i'm really pleased with all that it's been great meeting so many new people and i think today's episode is
going to be a great example of that working with people who none of us had met before and i think that's the power of the podcast great alliteration there um of connecting people who are interested in science and yeah it's absolutely right i think we started off having never done a podcast before not really knowing what we're doing we've learned so much about it in that time as well and we've got i was expecting to hit a thousand downloads by christmas and we totally smashed that so i think well
done team we're we're well on our way to 2000 downloads actually so i'm so impressed yeah and uh another thing to celebrate is 700 twitter followers that's insane yeah so i think that says we're talking about interesting things and things are moving in the right direction so yeah great celebration for the end of the year yes it's brilliant and i think we should also mention we were featured on bbc cumbria was that right as well that was another big big achievement of the year i was
definitely very proud of that and i think proud of just getting an episode out every two weeks laura from your side you've been involved with every single episode that's amazing over the last nine months which have been so difficult definitely something to be proud of yeah there was a bit of scrambling occasionally to find something to talk about and do some research in time so that was that was good fun absolutely brilliant so yeah we decided we're going to take a break for the
christmas period so this will be our last episode of the year and we'll be back in january with more interesting and engaging content but for now i'm going to listen to this conversation so i'm going to hand back over to you anika thanks laura so okay let's get back to nanobots and james bond fun fact i've never seen a james bond movie so let's see how this this episode goes and i don't i know nothing about nanobots either i think that's the most important
part of the the conversation but i think i'm to start off with emma so what do you know about nanobots and how does this relate i study medical biochemistry but what i'm really really interested in is uh genetics and sort of the molecular scale therapy that we can focus and i would say that the main interest of biochemical research right now is to sort of look at diseases and figure out how we can design the perfect molecule to go to the core of the disease basically on the molecular level and
treat it with the least amount amount of side effects and basically maximizing the benefits i would sort of describe it as delivering the smallest little pill or the smallest little injection to the patient's body without bothering them too much and i think that now i basically described uh nanomedicine and nanotechnology is in itself it's you can sort of imagine it as a small little agent that aims to take an effect in a person's body it can be a good one but i think it can be also a bad one
no and that sounds like really vital research and definitely something we need to be paying attention to hara what about you do you have anything to add on on this area um yeah so i'm doing chemical engineering so i'm more interested in the more practical machinery uh part of nanotechnology um so within chemical engineering i am interested in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals but nanotechnology can find application in either producing nanomedicine so that's seeing what the challenges are in mass
producing medicines of that scale or it can even apply to for example in cancer imaging for example how we can use nanoparticles and that will help decrease the effects that x-rays and all the radiation that comes from machines like x-rays mris and all those and because they also do they do harm like the health the healthy tissues surrounding the thing that you're trying to target so it is really interesting seeing how the nanoparticles can decrease its effects
well so there seems to be a wide range of applications for this technology that's that's fantastic priyanka what about you why are you interested in nanobots so basically my degree is very very similar to emma's i'm doing under my third year for elect for biochemistry and my main interest does lie in drug development and um that attack but specifically non-attacking cancer therapy the drug development aspect and nanotech kind of comes together for me because basically when we use nanotech
and cancer therapy we can kind of functionalize the surfaces with drugs or proteins mrna any of that in order to increase the precision of cancer therapy which is something that's been very fascinating to me and it's actually something i did my second year dissertation on so i am very excited about the topic brilliant so i think i've already learned so much already coming from someone who stopped doing biology at gcsc about the importance of this kind of nanotechnology in delivering
medicines without kind of having a huge impact on people and there's a wide range of applications across lots of different types of illnesses and things like that including cancer so maybe let's go a bit back to basics can i ask all of you three what do we mean by nano when we're talking about nanoparticles nanobots what does that actually mean um i would say that well as in most science subjects we learn about nano and sn to the power of minus nine but i would say that in nano medicine we
we are really looking at like molecular level stuff to put it maybe in a perspective a fun little fact a dna is two nanometers wide so i think that we are really really looking into the probably the deepest we can get without making effects yeah so that's basically what nano i think means to me and maybe like viral g and chemistry so we really mean things of the scale of 10 to the minus 9 meters that's what this technology is it's on on this kind of scale so then if we move on to the
second part of the word robot so as an engineer we use robots a lot especially i'm working in the nuclear industry this is a really key area of work but i'm assuming there's not like remote handling arms going into people's bodies for this kind of technology so what do mean what do we mean by bots in this context is it the same as robots or is it something a bit different um i think it's not necessarily i think it it's related to the general idea of what a robot does which is automatically
target something or do something so for example like as emma and priyanka mentioned about targeted medicine and having a more targeted therapy to cancer for example so what the non-neurobots pretty much for me at least mean is that have that target instead of having a method where it targets what we want to target but also affecting the other areas surrounding it it mainly affects the thing that we want to target the particle or the molecule so it's for me it's more like
the robot means targeted rather than targeted and automatically yeah i think that's that's a brilliant explanation that's really that's really clarified um things from my side so it's very very small it's 10 to the minus nine meters and the the bot part is that it only looking at one specific area without impacting other stuff so the side effects related with medicines and things like that is trying to limit those kind of side effects and only target what it needs to be looking at
that's really clear thank you guys so we've discussed what it means is this technology being used at the moment uh is it something that is in practice in current medicine it is based on the research i had like i've done currently clinical trials basically investigating the role of nanoparticles uh or like nanotechnology in cancer therapy specifically proton therapy nanoparticles involvement in radiotherapy actually has been has been well researched over the past decade uh
there have been quite a few articles that have come out and it's pretty hot topic right now but a newer form like a newer a very new field that we have right now is using nanoparticles and proton therapy so this is very very possible we can completely we can completely change how we see cancer cancer therapy just because of how precise using nanotechnology is essentially we can reduce the side effects yeah we can reduce the side effects in terms of using nanotechnology in in medicine i think
it's a very very strong like prospect because we've used it in the past we've used it for radiotherapy and now we're looking into researching proton therapy and essentially how radiotherapy works is it uses uh radiation which is targeted towards the spec towards specific tumor cells uh so essentially what nanotech can do is target those specific femoral cells increase sensitivity of them and it can allow us to actually deliver lower doses of radiation which can
decrease the side effects as uhura was talking about earlier we can essentially reduce the side effects to by almost 50 percent um so it's a very hot topic and current research is focusing on proton therapy which has shown a lot more radio sensitivity and a lot more um prospects of survival in cancer patients so it's a very very promising it sounds like a bit of a game changer to me and especially someone coming from a nuclear background i know how serious the
effects of of a radiation are in our industry and we always try to limit our doses and what people are exposed to so if there's a way that cancer patients are not having to face such high you know high doses that's that's brilliant and it sounds really important hara what about from from your side from the chemical engineering side are there any kind of things that are going on at the moment with with the nanotech and the nanobots um yeah there are many methods that
can produce nanoparticles that are used in nanomedicine um but what there are some challenging in scaling up those productions because at the moment they're mainly like in the lab scale but it it's definitely promising and there's a vanilla improvement to that but it just depends on what process is being used to mass produce that product because different machinery that's been used can affect the particle in a different way for example if you are if you want to mix a solution that includes the
nanoparticles the education speed and the time can affect the size of the particle and make it even smaller and then you and then because the size is affected that might affect some of its uh characteristics and abilities so you just have to really look into its specific machinery that will have to be used to mass produce it and then just go from there but there are like there are multiple methods so it's just like finding which one is best as of right now that can be
easily developed further and then moving from there so from what both of you are saying a lot of this technology is quite small scale at the moment it's not being it's not being mass produced yet and there's a lot of ah sorry i just saw laura laughs at my small scale and i realized that's quite a good pun sorry i'm a bit slow sometimes i didn't mean it as a pun but anyway it's it's a small scale kind of um production is going on at the moment and the chemical engineers are
doing a lot of work in trying to produce mass production techniques and that's a key area of research at the moment totally okay if you don't know this tara because this is off the script but can you talk a bit about the production methods is there anything that is like very popular at the moment about producing these kind of nanobots i'm not really sure it just really depends on what the characteristics and abilities of its particle is because for example some might be more
driven based on the density others might be more based on the uh on their absorption abilities so it just really depends on what what the abilities of its um particle on every product that you're working on has fantastic so they'll have to develop different manufacturing techniques depending on what the nanobots are going to be used for and what their properties and characteristics are for those applications as well okay fantastic emma do you want to talk a little bit more i
know you mentioned before about taylormade drugs and altering specific genes which i believe was what happened in james bond did they alter genes in people with these nanobots is that what happened i don't know has anyone actually seen james bond it was kind of the clickbait thing we used at the beginning of our article have any of us seen this new move they want to target specific people so it does have to do something with their genes probably but don't think it's um yeah i'm not really sure
okay but they did do some kind of targeting of specific people so maybe that's related to yeah emma your comment about targeting specific genes or tailoring drugs to specific people and maybe you could discuss that in a healthcare application or maybe international espionage yeah so i think if we wanted to target specific people we would definitely have to look at their genes because it's basically what makes us different from each other and yeah taylor medicine looks at our
genes basically our genomes which which is the well basically all of our genes to get there so we look at them we figure out where the problem is and we try to figure out how to eliminate the problem by specifically targeting uh the issue on our on a molecular scale scale scale level sorry i would say yes so uh if we figure out where the problem is we can manufacture a nanobot which we can sort of imagine as a collateral molecule that's that's attached to an agent we can that can go
to the place of the disease for example we have cystic fibrosis and we are missing a certain protein we can attach an animal to a transcription factor or maybe even the protein itself but i would say transcription factor delivered to the person and now in the body the nanobot can sort of act as a on and off switch so we can switch on the production of of the protein and solve the issue transcription factor is a is a protein that sort of attaches to our dna and
uh switches onto uh the production of a larger larger body i would say like a larger protein basically but it's like a little lego puzzle piece that fits into the and into the big machine yeah so it can act as an on switch starting to make the desired protein that's for some reason not working or it i think it can also act as an off switch for example blocking the production of a toxin that's doing the issue and the body and yeah i basically said the good parts
it's going to do but i think that it can also do some bad which for example if we attach the nanobot to a certain molecule that can um alter the genes we can sort of create designer humans so for example we can create people with certain aspects that we fit think are beneficial and i think that in the wrong hands this this can this doesn't have to be very safe yeah unfortunately with i think all the research all of us are doing there's always going to be people who can use
that in in in bad ways and good ways and it's really important to try and be responsible with our work as researchers um but i think that's a really good summary of the current state of nanobots so we've discussed that that the applications um for cancer cancer imaging um production of nanodrugs we've also discussed the production capabilities from a chemical engineering perspective and how it could be targeted to specific people and specific genes i think our producers just sent a
message that does that mean in james bond it could have killed people by releasing toxins or promoting cell death and i guess from what emma's just said yeah that could be a potential potential use so we have to be really careful with with this technology i think yeah so we've discussed the present state i want to talk a bit about the future now so we've mentioned a bit of the ethics and the concerns around that and and emma's mentioned designer babies could there be another type of
technology that's that's more appropriate um i think when it comes to medicine it's really important to sort of weigh the benefits and the disadvantages that come with the treatment whereas nanobots are really really beneficial in in the way that they are small they they act quickly but we also need to take in into the account is when we deliver foreign bodies into the human body it can sort of accumulate and it sometimes happen that some of the materials are
not really possible to be degraded by our liver for example so they can accumulate and over a long period of time some people may experience inflammation which can lead to more damage even than the actual disease so i would say that well the future of nanomedicine is still far away but i think that people are definitely going to look at other other possibilities with drug delivery and drug treatment which sort of passes by these these complications so using more conventional kind of drugs
drugs and medicines you mean rather than the more advanced uh technology fantastic another kind of thing that's on everyone's uh minds at the moment is like the involvement of a.i is there any involvement of ai in nanobots research or more generally in in the kind of areas that you guys are working on i'm not really sure if there is but i don't see the reason why for example because if we are to take personalized medicine or in general like use nanotechnology in
order to target specific parts of our bodies then maybe ai will be used in order to like get the nano particle into our body that way maybe yeah absolutely because i think machine learning i think machine learning and ai is a different thing and all the computer scientists are going to come at me and send hate comments now um but no i think it definitely could be used for for this kind of uh technology what about you priyanka do you see any kind of things going forward in the in the
future of of nanobots or nano medicine that we need to keep an eye out on i think i'm pretty optimistic about the future of nanomedicine because like apart from this i like because of my interest in drug development i have been looking a lot into the like antibiotic research and everything and something that's over there it's a reoccurring theme is antibiotic resistance so essentially drugs in general are kind of losing their abilities specifically antimicrobials and losing their ability
to treat patients so um we're always looking for ways to increase specificity increase treatment options and unfortunately at the place we are right now um it's looking a little bleak from that perspective which is why i'm a little optimistic about nanomedicine because essentially what it does is as we like as we've seen from mnhara it kind of increases the precision of the currently existing medicine it's not i feel like if we look into like the production aspect of it it wouldn't be um it's
not as far away as you think it is and it's a huge possibility of kind of increasing changing the perspective of how we see medicine and pharmaceuticals in general it sounds like there could be a major shift in the way that medicine is practiced with this technology haro emma do you have anything that you want to add to that or any you know comments on on the future well um none of that maybe nanotechnology is not just used within medicine but healthcare in general because i know for
example there's been a lot of research uh about for example transtalmer patches for example where you transmit the medicine into the bloodstream through patches through the individual skin rather than injections so maybe it's important to just see in general that none of the applications of nanotechnology not just in the medicine side of it but also in healthcare in general fantastic emma were you going to add something i just i wanted to add a little fun fact that nanomedicine is
sort of looking at also utilizing bacteria and and sort of delivering these drugs so if we imagine bacteria are moving by their their flagella sort of mechanical creating electricity which could be used in these nanobots activating them and delivering them to to the sites of disease and i think this would be an alternative to maybe attaching them to a toxic agent if we attach them to bacteria which move by themselves and are degraded by the body we sort of eliminate the toxicity but yeah that's
just still far away brilliant so i think we've kind of covered what is the the current status of things and now we've looked at going forward that we're going to have to be careful about how this technology is used because the ethics around it you know depending on who uses it could be it could be an issue it's got applications not just in medicine but also in healthcare which i think is a really important point and also for me as a silly engineer i didn't really
appreciate the difference between medicine and healthcare so that's also opened open my mind as well um does anyone have any final comments that they want to add before we before we wrap up when i was little there was this uh cartoon called the magical school bus where they sort of minimalized a school bus full of kids and somebody swallowed it it traveled into the body and they sort of like looked around the body figuring out how it works and when i didn't really know about what that
elbows were i sort of imagine it like that like some little metal man going into my body and like cutting up the disease or the process but i would say that it's not really that glamorous it's basically scientists in the lab figuring out a molecule that that fits in our body it's not really a bus full of kids trying to figure out how the body works i have the same image in my mind i wasn't expecting like inspector gadget or um what was that movie was it honey i
shrunk the kids when like this guy like shrinks all of his kids and i was just imagining these little people wandering around in in people's bodies so i guess that's been the most disappointing part of this episode to find out that it's actually just it's good science and and uh molecules as you've said i guess maybe we can also discuss james bond again because that's that's what we got everyone into the episode with so in this latest james wand which none of us have seen he
did james one kill people i don't know if that's a spoiler alert if you're a big james bond fan but this nanotech was used to to kill people in the movie what do you guys think might be the next nanotech in in james bond or in in science fiction uh movies or in movies in general do you think there's something that might be coming up in future things that we are watching maybe in the recovery of james bond yes for example because for example no in the previous movie not the newest one
or in one of the movies anyways he apparently got shot and then he was out of the game for quite a long time so maybe we could see non-technology in helping james bond recover faster so he doesn't disappear into an unknown island and nobody can find it i think i would pay to watch that um movie for sure i think that would that sounds brilliant i also it's not a movie but i want to just recommend a really good german series that's related to biotechnology and
these kind of things called biohackers it is fiction but i think they like show things in a really interesting way and make it make you think especially for someone who's not a specialist in in this area so i'd like to give a shout out to biohackers for being a really cool uh tv show and i think it's really important that we do have science and technology in these shows whether it's fully realistic or not i think it does inspire the new generation and it i guess it forces the public to think
about certain technology i know we actually struggle with that in the nuclear sector because all the shows are made about the disasters i don't know as people with a background in in science and medicine do you struggle with how the technology that you guys are working on is portrayed in media in tv shows in movies um well i would say that maybe in the current pandemic it's sometimes even downplayed the people don't really believe this what scientists are doing are is really useful
but i don't know on one hand it's it can be downplayed but also on the other i think i quite like it because they make it sound very interesting and and amazing and making us feel like the the mastermind science is behind all of the all of the the magic really but yeah it really depends what context it is absolutely and i just want to reiterate that i think all three of you are mastermind scientists in this area because i've learned so much in this episode from
something i just literally knew nothing about at the beginning i feel i i definitely have more of an idea and i hope our listeners do as well so i think we've kind of deviated enough of off topic now that we should kind of draw the conversation to a close so to kind of summarize the episode these nanobots are an emerging technology there are some ways that it's currently in use like targeted cancer therapy and nano materials are obviously in use in a lot of medical applications today more
nano medicine is under development and maybe there will be some other technology that will emerge that's even better we've discussed the importance of it in healthcare and medicine so for many different applications and how that there needs to be a lot of research in in developing techniques for for manufacturing this technology as well as using it find us on twitter technicallyspur11 twitter handle if you want to carry on this conversation or leave a comment on the episode on
whatever listening platform you're listening to us on and i just like to really thank our guests again priyanka emma and hara i really hope you can do more episodes because i think this is one of my favorite ones that i've ever recorded so thank you guys the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate us leave a review
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