Enhancing Oncology with Nanorobotics

Abstract

Lung cancer was ranked 6 th among 'the top 10 global causes of death in 2019' by the World Health Organisation (WHO), with breast cancer and cervical cancer being the most common among Indian Women. The 2020 cancer death toll is devastating - approximately 10 million worldwide, with 8.5 hundred thousand in India. Common cancer therapies have a high failure rate because of various drawbacks - inefficient drug delivery, destruction of healthy cells around the tumor, and drug toxicity to name a few. The key attributes of efficient cancer management are - early-stage diagnosis and targeted therapy. Although nanomedicine has already been contributing to mitigate the drawbacks, advances in nanorobotics show that engineered nanorobots can be used to provide precision and expedition in early detection, and targeted drug delivery, ergo destruction of only cancer cells, leaving the normal cells alone. These computer-controlled nanomachines can be injected into symptomatic patients to perform diagnosis and therapy at a molecular level by sensing and destroying the cancer cells, and once their job is done, they would leave the body via excretory or respiratory systems. This would also minimize surgeon-patient contact. The application of nanorobotics in cancer theranostics, simultaneously performing diagnosis and therapy, holds a promising and revolutionized future of healthcare with an improved cancer survival rate. This review aims to outline the design, mechanism, applications in cancer diagnosis and therapy, and future outlook of nanorobots.