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PANACEA: AN INTERNET OF BIO-NANOTHINGS APPLICATION FOR
EARLY DETECTION AND MITIGATION OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES

Ian F. Akyildiz

Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

The state-of-the-art diagnostics, monitoring, and therapy are limited by the imprecise nature of
current methods and use of devices that are either external, or when implanted, suffer from large size.
A breakthrough is eminent since we are at a critical crossroad in biomedical research in which our
ability to miniaturize sensors and electronics is unprecedented, and our understanding of biological
systems enables fine-grained manipulation and control of behavior of cells down to the molecular
level. These technologies will be leveraged to create Internet of Bio-NanoThings (IoBNT), which
is envisioned to be a heterogeneous network of nanoscale bio-electronic components and engineered
biological cells, so called Bio-NanoThings (BNT), communicating via electromagnetic waves, and
via molecular communication. The objective of this concept is to directly interact with the cells
enabling more accurate sensing and eventually control complicated biological dynamics of the human
body in real time.

As the enabler of IoBNT, Molecular Communication (MC) arises from the observation of chemical
communications in and among the basic units of life, i.e. biological cells, where the information is
represented, exchanged and stored in the form of molecules. The key processes of chemical reactions
and molecular transport are at the basis of encoding, propagation, and processing of information
bearing molecular signals. The focus of this discipline is on the modeling, characterization, and
engineering of information transmission through molecule exchange, with immediate applications in
biotechnology, medicine, ecology, and defense, among others. In the past decade of MC research, the
first studies focused on the physical layer characteristics of communication channels where MC
techniques are defined based on the transport mechanism such as diffusion-based and flow-based MC,
chemotaxis, and molecular motors. However, there is still limited investigation on the definition of
technologies for practical applications of MC. Here, we present a novel perspective on the theory of
MC by expanding on existing and future studies for its application to healthcare.
To illustrate how MC brings together biological and cyber worlds for healthcare applications, we
introduce the concept of a new cyber-physical system called, PANACEA (a solution or remedy for
all difficulties or diseases in Latin), which is a closed-loop solution to the problem of monitoring
infections. PANACEA leverages cutting-edge technologies in the cyber (i.e. machine learning, big
data analytics, cloud computing, security) and physical (i.e. bio-nanosensors, magnetic and wireless
communications) domains to continuously monitor the tissues at risk of serious infection for early
detection and mitigation of infections. By tapping into cell-to-cell communication mechanisms of
bacteria infecting human body, it is possible to estimate the increase in the population of the bacteria
indicating an infection even before the patient shows symptoms. Bio-nanosensors sense
communication molecules, so-called quorum sensing molecules, exchanged among the infectious
bacteria. Quorum sensing is the major cell-to-cell communication mechanism where bacteria produce
and release chemical signal molecules whose external concentration increases as a function of
increasing cell-population density. Therefore, by sensing the concentration of its quorum sensing
molecules, it is possible to estimate the density of the infectious bacteria population. This can be used
to detect infection, which is the invasion of various healthy human tissues by pathogenic bacteria that
are multiplying and disrupting tissues’ operation, causing diseases.

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