Re:Eye-surgery by magnetically-guided microrobots moves towa...
by ihnorton on Wednesday June 26, 2013 @02:28PM
(#5947979)
There are some non-robot implementations of this kind of idea out there, including:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibritumomab_tiuxetan
and more generally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibodies
tl;dr: use cancer-specific antibodies with a payload of a drug, gene vector, or radioactive particle (!) to very specifically kill cells.
It suggests that a future treatment for cancers might be to "drive" a robot to a tumor cell where the end of the robot has a resonant cavity and them beam the patient with the required frequency radio signal which blows up the cell that the robot has inserted its resonant cavity into. I can't imagine yet how you could do that at the same time as imaging the cancer cells but clearly there are interesting opportunities here.