Google's medical nanobots would know you're sick before you did

Last month at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJD Live global technology conference, Google announced a new initiative reminiscent of the classic 1966 thriller, Fantastic Voyage. Google isn’t trying to miniaturize a submarine so it can be injected into a human body to destroy blood clots, but what it’s proposing is eerily similar: sending thousands of microscopic nanoparticles into the bloodstream to seek out and identify cancerous cells with enough detail to allow doctors to attack them at the early stages.

“‘Nanotechnology’ is a sort of term reserved for very small particles,” Google’s Andrew Conrad said at the conference. “They’re so small that thousands of them could fit within a red blood cell or millions of them could sit within a grain of sand. And our idea was to functionalize these nanoparticles, to make them do what we want.”

Conrad explained how a patient could, theoretically, swallow a pill filled with nanoparticles that detect other molecules. They course through a patient’s body, and then physicians can query them to find out what they saw.

The idea of medical applications for nanoparticles isn’t new. But Google will bring its unique blend of capital investment and intellectual creativity to the effort. Conrad, a flip-flop-wearing surfing enthusiast with a Ph.D. in cell biology from UCLA, has put together a team of 100 experts from fields as varied as astrophysics and electrical engineering to work on the nanoparticle platform.

The ambitious project is not without critics, however. There will be a number of technical hurdles to jump before it can be deployed. How are the particles actually going to get into the bloodstream? Will the body’s natural defenses try to attack and destroy them? How will they be eliminated when they’re no longer needed?

Google also is likely to face regulatory barriers from the Food and Drug Administration.

“When you put something in the body that’s going to stay there, the FDA wants to make sure it’s safe, and they’ve got some hurdles for that,” said Ron Winslow, The Wall Street Journal’s medical correspondent.

Perhaps the biggest concern in many minds, given that this is a Google project, is privacy. Conrad stresses Google wouldn’t collect or store any personal medical data. Instead, it would license the technology to others who would handle the information and its security.

In order to understand what they’ll be looking at, Conrad’s life sciences team is building a picture of a healthy human being by genetically screening samples from thousands of people. Ultimately, nanoparticles could enable doctors to compare medical data for a particular patient to that healthy, baseline profile.

“The analogy in medicine is like, imagine you want to explore Parisian culture, and you do it by flying a helicopter over Paris once a year. That’s what doctors do now,” Conrad said. “What we’re hoping to do is, these little particles go out and mingle with the people. We call them back to one place and we ask them, ‘Hey, what did you see? Did you find cancer? Did you see something that looks like a fragile plaque for a heart attack? Did you see too much sodium? What did you see?’”

An adviser to the project estimated Google researchers are at least five years away from developing a nanotechnology pill or other product that could be approved for use by doctors.

Listen to Michael Cochrane describe Google X’s nanoparticle platform on The World and Everything in It: