Aggregated News
This week Google described its ambitious plan to use magnetic nanoparticles circulating through the blood to detect and report back on signs of cancer or an impending heart attack. Some nanotechnology experts, however, have responded by asking whether Google’s project is more science fiction than medical reality.
“It’s very exciting that a company with Google’s financial firepower is taking on this big challenge,” says Chad Mirkin, who directs the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University. But he says that what Google has described is “an intent to do something, not a discovery or a pathway to get there.” At this point, he says, the technology is speculative: it’s basically “a good Star Trek episode.”
Google’s basic idea is nothing new—researchers have been developing magnetic nanoparticle diagnostics and treatments for years (see “Nanomedicine”). In the announcement, Andrew Conrad, head of the Life Sciences team at the Google X research lab, said “essentially the idea is simple.”
The concept might be simple, but executing it isn’t. Employing nanoparticles in the body is very difficult, and it’s...