Google Wants To Fill Your Blood With Tiny Disease-Killing Particles

Any tech company that lasts long enough and makes enough money will try, somehow, to stop death, or at least substantially push it back. Google is no exception, having made some fairly substantial investments in biotech, but nothing is quite as ambitious, or as strange, as its idea to fill your bloodstream with little disease-killing chunks of metal.

Here’s how it works: You take in nanoparticles through whichever method you choose. Inhaling, ingesting, injecting, really anything that gets them into your blood. The nanoparticles are designed to bond with certain disease-causing agents, whether they’re cancer cells or hostile proteins or what have you. Then you strap on a wearable near an artery or a vein, and it transmits a pulse making those nanoparticles heat up or vibrate, essentially cooking and/or jackhammering those disease-causing little buggers to death.

It sounds like New Age junk, but the method itself has been kicking around serious scientific circles for quite a while. Nanoparticles are widely seen as the next frontier in pharmaceutical applications, so Google’s interest in them isn’t unusual. What is unusual is Google filing a patent for a medical device, which is not exactly a field it spends a lot of time in.

Will we ever see it? Well, even Google can’t get around testing regulations, so likely if there’s going to be an actual, viable product from this, their next step will be to start testing in the field. Which will also answer the other question everyone has: The theory’s cool, but will it work in practice?

×