World's smallest car delivers drugs

Nanoscale devices that can deliver drugs to specific destinations inside the body are now a step closer as scientists develop a microscopic motor for the world’s smallest car

The researchers installed a miniature light-powered motor in the nanocar - which is so small that roughly 20,000 of them could park side-by-side in a space no wider than a human hair.

Ben Feringa, who developed the motor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, told Laboratory News: “The rotary motor we developed is the first in its kind to be an entirely synthetic light-driven unidirectional rotary motor.”
It is hoped that the car, and devices like it, could be developed into nanoshuttles – vectors that can deliver drugs to specific bodily regions – with the techniques learnt during this nanoconstruction.

Professor James Tour, who attached the motor to the nanocar at Rice University Tour, said: “We want to construct things from the bottom up, one molecule at a time, in much the same way that biological cells use enzymes to assemble proteins and other supermolecules.”

The nanocar consists of a rigid chassis and four alkyne axles that spin freely and swivel independently of one another. The original model of the nanocar had wheels made of soccer-ball-like buckyball molecules. However, those proved to drain too much energy from the motor and so a nano-scale pit-stop was performed to replace them with spherical molecules of carbon, hydrogen and boron called p-carborane.

Researchers say that the technology could also be used to manufacture tiny factories or help run miniscule computers. Ben Feringa told Laboratory News: “We also were able to assemble these motors on a surface and have now constructed a kind of ‘nanowindmill park’ driven by light.”