Presupuesto histórico, Programas Sociales para el desarrollo y mejoramiento de

MC is a completely new paradigm and would potentially enable many new applications in various fields. Examples of future applications that MC enables are described below.

2.6.1 Biomedical applications

Biomedical applications are the most promising and major application group that would benefit from MC. For example, with the help of nanotechnology, it is possible to interact with cell components including cells, tissues and organs, to manipulate the cell proliferation and differentiation, and to implement the production and organization of extracellular matrices [88]. The principal applications in the biomedical field would be in developing enhanced immune systems, bio-hybrid implant systems, targeted drug delivery systems, health monitoring systems, and tissue engineering systems [5, 89].

Targeted drug delivery may be performed by encapsulating drug molecules in drug delivery carriers, sending the carriers to the target site (e.g., disease cells or tumours), and releasing the drug molecules from the carriers at the target site [79]. These nanoscale capsules can bind to specific receptors of the targeted cells. Therefore, targeted drug delivery can reduce the potential adverse effects of drug molecules on

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non-targeted organs [90]. Also, MC may provide alternative techniques to improve the targeting accuracy and the therapeutic effect through the coordinate of bio- nanomachines. For example, when a nanomachine can detect some special molecules released from a sick cell, it can share information with the nanomachines nearby, which would become alerted and can behave cooperatively against the sick cell. Tissue engineering, which aims at assembling functional constructs that restore, maintain, or improve damaged tissues or whole organs [91], is also a promising application of MC. Tissue engineering refers to the process of extracting the stem cells from patients, culturing them in vitro, and eventually returning the cultured stem cells to the lost tissue part of the patient. MC can provide additional mechanisms to help control the growth and differentiation of the autologous cells into specific structures [27]. The products of tissue engineering, such as bio-artificial skins with viable and nonviable cells and autologous cultured chondrocytes, have been put into the market [92].

The research object of enhanced immune systems is to enhance the immune responses of the human body [93]. Introducing artificial immune systems into the human body may be helpful to protect from infectious agents such as parasites, virus, bacteria and fungi [94]. In enhanced immune systems, MC may enable the communication and coordination of a group of bio-nanomachines, for example, the tracking of moving targets (e.g., pathogens) and the notification to external devices of the target location for further treatment [95].

2.6.2 Industrial applications

MC has promising applications in industrial fields, such as the monitoring and control of microbial formations. For example, bacterial biofilms have been used to clean residual waters coming from different manufacturing processes or to treat

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organic waste in [96, 97], using MC networks. Also, MC can be used to improve the quality of food, including the production, processing, safety and packaging. For example, a number of studies have indicated that QS, which is a promising method of MC, plays a major role in food spoilage, biofilm formation, and food-related pathogenesis [98]. Besides, the agricultural industry can benefit from food materials which contain multiple bio-nanomachines through which the growth process can be controlled [14]. In manufacturing industry, molecular manufacturing can solve a number of current problems, such as water shortage [99]. Also, advanced molecular manufacturing technology will enable the fabrication of clean, efficient, and low cost complex products, for example, materials much stronger than steel, and superior military systems [99].

2.6.3 Environmental applications

MC may also be applied in monitoring an environment that may be contaminated with toxic or radioactive agents. Specifically, the integration of bio-nanomachines can be performed into large or small scale devices, which are deployed in the environment to form a large scale biosensor network [14]. Identification of the location of foreign contamination or toxins can be achieved through the utilization of bio-nanomachines to monitor molecules in the environment, which can be helpful to identify and amplify molecular signals with the cooperation of a group of nanomachines, which will be helpful to remove toxins or contaminations [100, 101].

2.6.4 Information technology applications

The area of information technology may be advanced by integrating bio- nanomachines into currently available silicon-based electrical systems using MC. For example, future mobile phones may be equipped with a biochip, which may be possible to diagnose diseases or stress by directly analysing biomolecules, such as a

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drop of sweat, tear, saliva and blood [102]. The molecular transport system would be packaged in the biochip and the acquired results would be transmitted to a medical specialist via traditional cellular networks. A dermal screen, which is made from as many as 3 billion bio-nanomachines and embedded below the skin surface of a human body, is another example of the application of MC in advancing information technology [103]. In addition, MC may apply to non-silicon-based computing paradigms, which has promising features including extremely high functional complexity and large scale parallelism that cannot be achieved with conventional silicon-based electronic circuits [14].