Roughly speaking, there are three ways to treat disease: surgery, drugs and radiotherapy.

The first two of these methods date back at least as far as ancient Egypt. Radiotherapy, a more recent innovation, was first used in 1899. All three techniques have advanced significantly over the years, but no radically new ways to treat disease have been developed in over a century.

That may be about to change. Researchers are currently developing microscopic structures called “nanobots” that have the potential to herald a new era in healthcare.

The vision is that these virus-sized nanobots will navigate through our bodies, locating problem areas and delivering a highly targeted remedy of some kind. This approach could potentially cause less trauma than surgery and be more precisely targeted than drugs or radiotherapy.

Scientists envision a number of applications. Nanobots could be used to destroy cancerous tumours by delivering drug payloads to just the tumour site, while preserving healthy surrounding tissue. They might be used heal severed nerves by delivering differentiated stem cells to the site of the injury. They could remove plaque from arteries and break up blood clots. They could repair faulty DNA before it starts replicating. They could even help cure gout by destroying the urate crystals that cause inflammation in the joints.

So far, nanobots have been successfully tested in cockroaches and mice.

In 2014, bioengineers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and Bar-Ilan University in Israel announced that they had injected nanobots made of DNA into a cockroach – the first time the technique had been used on a living creature.

The nanobots successfully carried out their mission:  they circulated in the cockroach’s blood stream and released their medicinal payload when they came into contact with a certain protein.

A few months later, in January 2015, scientists at the University of California, San Diego, revealed that they had tested the first self-propelled nanobots – in this case, made of polymer tubes coated in zinc –  inside a mouse.

In this case, the tiny machines were designed to release hydrogen bubbles when they came into contact with the hydrochloric acid in the mouse’s stomach. These bubbles propel the nanobots towards the stomach wall where they embedded themselves, later dissolving to deliver a nanoparticle compound directly into the stomach tissue.

This method could be used to treat peptic ulcers and other stomach-related illnesses, the researchers said.

It is not clear how long it will be until the first clinical trials of nanobots in humans. Some scientists say that we are decades away: the US Food and Drug Administration will want to see more pre-clinical trials in mice and possibly other animals before approving human trials. But others, such as Dr Ido Bachelet – one of the researchers on the cockroach study – believe such trials could begin in just a couple of years.

Would you be comfortable having trillions of nanobots coursing through your veins, even if the drug regulators declared them safe? Share your thoughts by joining the Future Realities LinkedIn group, sponsored by Dassault Systèmes.