Nanomotors shake up living cells from the inside

The nanomotors, which are rocket-shaped metal particles, move around inside the cells, spinning and knocking against the cell membrane. Applications are foreseen in medicine.

‘As these nanomotors move around and bump into structures inside the cells, the live cells show internal mechanical responses that no one has seen before,’ said Tom Mallouk, Evan Pugh Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics at Penn State. ‘We might be able to use nanomotors to treat cancer and other diseases by mechanically manipulating cells from the inside. Nanomotors could perform intracellular surgery and deliver drugs non-invasively to living tissues.’

Chemically powered nanomotors first were developed ten years ago at Penn State by a team that included chemist Ayusman Sen and physicist Vincent Crespi, in addition to Mallouk.

‘Our first-generation motors required toxic fuels and they would not move in biological fluid, so we couldn’t study them in human cells,’ Mallouk said in a statement.