"Here's your swarm medicine prescription": Investigating the ethical and regulatory complexity of in-human testing of robotic nanoswarms

This project falls within the EPSRC clinical technologies research area where healthcare technologies is one of the themes or research areas listed on this website https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/research/ourportfolio/themes/. Cancer drugs, such as chemotherapy are systemic, this means they can also kill healthy cells alongside cancerous cells leading to potential side effects. Nanomedicine is the medical application of nanotechnology which works on manipulating matter at the nanoscale, such as nanoparticles that can assist the delivery of chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells. Scientists and Engineers can use in silico models for selecting nanoparticles based on nanoparticle design, so drugs can more effectively reach the tumour while avoiding healthy cells. Now, scientists and engineers are working on control and adding artificial swarm intelligence (present in social animals such as birds, ants, fish and termites) to nanoparticles and nanorobots.

Nanoswarms are multiple agents that can interact with each other or their environment to achieve a task (e.g. deliver chemotherapy to a tumour without killing healthy cells), exhibiting collective behaviour inspired by swarm behaviour. As and when this technology becomes ready for first-in-human tests, decisions will have to made about how it can and should be safely tested. It is essential to evaluate stakeholders and engagement of key stakeholder groups throughout the research process, which is a core feature of comparative effectiveness research. We aim to create a regulatory framework for the first in-human nanoswarm clinical trial combining swarm robotics, qualitative research methods, bioethics and nanomedicine (see Swana, M., Blee, J., Stillman, N., Ives, J., Hauert, S. (2022). Swarms: The Next Frontier for Cancer Nanomedicine. In: Balaz, I., Adamatzky, A. (eds) Cancer, Complexity, Computation. Emergence, Complexity and Computation, vol 46. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04379-6_12). A part of this involves the SWARM study (SWARM - Small robots With collective behaviour as AI-driven cancer therapies; building Regulations for future nanoMedicines) - This project has been reviewed and approved by the University of Bristol Faculty of Engineering Research Ethics Committee (Ref: 11141).