Future
In this section, the future implications and the issues that might arise will be discussed. In particular ELSI, or ethical, legal, and social implications will be discussed thoroughly.
In this section, the future implications and the issues that might arise will be discussed. In particular ELSI, or ethical, legal, and social implications will be discussed thoroughly.
Firstly, we hope that the results that we have established might serve as foundation for future ideas in nano swarm robotics.
In the future, in vivo experiments might be required to further assess the viability of these nanorobots as potential therapeutic devices. Similar to other DNA-based nanostructures, this system is prone to degradation by exo and endo-nucleases prevalent in blood (1). This degradation will hinder the ability of these nanostructures from being able to maintain its concentration in the target site. Therefore, further experiments are needed to determine structures more suitable for in-vivo studies: such as having a more compact structure (1), modifying the nucleotides to create synthetic nucleotides capable of evading nucleases (2), or other chemical modifications such as polyethyleneglycol (PEG) (3) that can improve in vivo half-life of these nanostructures. Nevertheless, this should also be balanced as modifications concerning artificial nucleotides for example, might give rise to unwanted toxicity effects (3).
Furthermore, the function of this nano swarm robots is not only restrained to therapeutics devices used for maintenance of drug delivery, other potential applications might also arise. For example, it can be used as a diagnostic device that can relay info depending on the substances that are present on the environment by programming the robots to elicit different responses upon ligand binding.
As with every technological innovation, there are bound to be issues regarding ethical, legal, and social implications that should be addressed. In the process of making, the folding of DNA is not always perfect 100% of the time, this faulty in DNA folding might give rise to completely different structures. These faulty structures, might possibly have unexpected features that end up being harmful to other objects in the environment.