One silly sci-fi idea is this. You might have a few “trigger pills” which are smaller than a blood cell, and travel through the bloodstream. You can observe them travel through the body using medical imaging techniques (e.g. PET), and they are designed to be very observable.
You wait until one of them is at the right location, and send very precise x-rays at it from all directions. The x-ray intensity is 1(distance from pill)2. A mechanism in the trigger pill responds to this ionizing (or heating?), and it anchors to the location using a chemical glue or physical mechanisms (hooks, string, etc.).
Once the trigger pill is anchored in place, another drug can be taken which only activates when it contacts the trigger pill. (Which might activate yet another drug, if you really want to amplify the effect of this tiny trigger pill.)
This results is a ton of drug activity in that area, without needing invasive surgery.
If you want it to become a bigger and more permanent implant, you might make it grow over time (by adding another chemical), deliberately forming a blood clot. Medical imaging may make sure the trigger pill is in a small expendable blood vessel (you detect the pill moving slower with more twists and turns). It might be designed so that yet another chemical can cover it up or destroy it, in case you need to start over at a new location.
It might be radioactive if it’s trying to treat cancer.
It might be magnetically activated if you want real-time control of drug intensity.
Speaking of magnetically activating it, maybe even the anchoring is triggered by a magnetic field rather than x-rays. It won’t be aimed as precisely, so you can only have one trigger pill at a time, and may have to wait really long before it travels to the right area (the human body is pretty big compared to any small target).
One silly sci-fi idea is this. You might have a few “trigger pills” which are smaller than a blood cell, and travel through the bloodstream. You can observe them travel through the body using medical imaging techniques (e.g. PET), and they are designed to be very observable.
You wait until one of them is at the right location, and send very precise x-rays at it from all directions. The x-ray intensity is 1(distance from pill)2. A mechanism in the trigger pill responds to this ionizing (or heating?), and it anchors to the location using a chemical glue or physical mechanisms (hooks, string, etc.).
Once the trigger pill is anchored in place, another drug can be taken which only activates when it contacts the trigger pill. (Which might activate yet another drug, if you really want to amplify the effect of this tiny trigger pill.)
This results is a ton of drug activity in that area, without needing invasive surgery.
If you want it to become a bigger and more permanent implant, you might make it grow over time (by adding another chemical), deliberately forming a blood clot. Medical imaging may make sure the trigger pill is in a small expendable blood vessel (you detect the pill moving slower with more twists and turns). It might be designed so that yet another chemical can cover it up or destroy it, in case you need to start over at a new location.
It might be radioactive if it’s trying to treat cancer.
It might be magnetically activated if you want real-time control of drug intensity.
Speaking of magnetically activating it, maybe even the anchoring is triggered by a magnetic field rather than x-rays. It won’t be aimed as precisely, so you can only have one trigger pill at a time, and may have to wait really long before it travels to the right area (the human body is pretty big compared to any small target).