"It's the magic of how DNA works," said Henderson, a professor of genetics, development and cell biology at Iowa State University.
Henderson, along with his former graduate student Divita Mathur, studies how to build nanomachines that may have real-world medical applications someday soon. He and Mathur recently published an article in the peer-reviewed Scientific Reports describing his laboratory's successful effort to design a nanomachine capable of detecting a mockup of the Ebola virus.
He said such a machine would prove valuable in the developing world, where access to diagnostic medical equipment can be rare. He said his nanotechnology could be fabricated cheaply and deployed easily. Used in conjunction with a smartphone app, nearly anyone could use the technology to detect Ebola or any number of other diseases and pathogens without the need for traditional medical facilities.
The trick lies in understanding the rules that govern how DNA works, Henderson said.
"It's possible to exploit that
rule set in a way that creates advantages for medicine and biotechnology,"
he said.
The iconic double-helix structure of
DNA means that one strand of DNA will bind only with a complementary side. Even
better, those compatible strands find each other automatically, like a castle
that builds itself. Henderson harnessed those same principles for his
nanomachines. The components, once added to water and then heated and cooled,
find each other and assemble correctly without any further effort from the
individual deploying the machines.
And just how "nano" is a
nanomachine? Henderson said about 40 billion individual machines fit in a
single drop of water.
The machines act as a diagnostic
tool that detects certain maladies at the genetic level. For the recently
published paper, Henderson and Mathur, now a postdoctoral research fellow at
the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the Naval Research
Laboratory in Washington, D.C., designed the machines to look for signs of
Ebola, though the experiments in the study used a mock version of the viral
genome and not the real thing. Henderson employed an embedded photonic system
that tests for the presence of the target molecules. If the machines sniff out
what they're looking for, the photonic system flashes a light, which can be
detected with a machine called a fluorometer.
Henderson said this sort of
technology could be modified to find certain kinds of molecules or pathogens,
allowing for virtually anyone, anywhere to run diagnostic tests without access
to medical facilities.
He also envisions a time when
similar nanoscale architectures could be used to deliver medication precisely
where it needs to go at precisely the right time. These nanomachines, built
from DNA, essentially would encapsulate the medication and guide it to its
target.
Henderson said such advances aren't
that far beyond the reach of modern medicine. It just requires scientists in
the field to think small. Really small, in this case.
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