No more side Effects from drugs : Nanotech to the rescue

The list of side effects on your prescription bottle may one day be a lot shorter.That's because instead of taking a conventional medication, you may swallow tiny "nanofactories," biochemical machines that act like cells.

For example, these ingested nanofactories, using magnetism, could detect a bacterial infection, produce a medication using the body's own materials, and deliver a dose directly to the bacteria. The drug would do its work only at the infection site, and thus not cause the side effects that may arise when an antibiotic travels throughout the body in search of infections.

It is to produce a tiny nanofactory and attach it to a target cell magnetically. The nanofactory then makes small molecules from surrounding materials and delivers the molecules--potentially drug molecules--to the targeted cell.

The researchers attached the nanofactories to E. coli cells, targeting them with the help of a mixture of iron particles and chitosan, a substance derived from the shells of crustaceans like crabs and shrimp. The nanofactories then produced a signaling molecule that could render the E. coli harmless. Nanofactories could be designed to produce the needed drug molecules over an extended period of time.

Few challenges before they can be used in humans.

1. Nanofactories must be cloaked so that the body does not react to them as a foreign substance and try to attack them.

2. Another goal is to find a method to shut down the nanofactory once it has produced the needed substance(type of off-switch) that could be activated from outside the body.

Soon u can see nanofactories in the prescriptions from your doctor...