Speaking of futuristic medicine, your doctor could be prescribing you nanomedicines in the not too distant future. Pretty much everything in your body that keeps you going, fights disease and helps you grow operates on a nano scale, so scaling down our technology to match means that we can interact with our systems on a much more precise level. With this new layer of subtlety, we could target cell damage, cancers and pathogens in hand-to-hand combat. For all our advances, current current medicines available to the general public are still more of a slash-and-grab affair. Sure, we can treat cancers, but by poisoning the whole body; we can cure infections, but with broad-spectrum antibiotics. With nanomedicines would make the whole thing much more targeted. So far for 2016, reports are emerging for the first human nanobot trials. These bots are designed to target cancers without the horrendous side-effects of chemo or radiotherapy. They can recognise up to 12 different cancers and differentiate cancerous cells from healthy ones. They're also smart enough not to interfere with one another, meaning that they can be used in conjunction with many other drugs. Beyond 2016, nanomedicine could find itself in the realms of prevention as well as treatment. In the same way you might get vaccinated today, you could someday be injected with a swarm of little guardian nanobots, capable of detecting the very earliest signs of ill health.
