The way we consume drugs/medicine right now might not necessarily be the most efficient way. This is why researchers have been working on the ability to deliver drugs to a particular part of the body, which apparently makes it more effective and can reduce the number of doseages a patient requires, and could also reduce the side-effects.
That being said, researchers at UC San Diego have recently come up with a new way of a targeted drug delivery system in the form of nano-sized fishes. These aren’t actual fishes, but rather they have been designed with certain fish-like features, such as having a head and a tailfin.
These “fishes” aren’t powered by any motors and are instead controlled via an oscillating magnetic field, and because of that there are size advantages (due to the lack of a motor) and it would also be faster than allowing them to move through your system naturally. However there are some downsides to this technology.
One of those is that the components of this fish aren’t biodegradable, meaning that getting them out of the patient’s body might be difficult. Also because materials like gold and silver are used in the creation of these fishes, they aren’t necessarily the cheapest solution either. However it is a pretty amazing advancement of the technology anyway.