Being able to order anything you want online and have it air-delivered to your house an hour later soundslifesaving, but it doesnt come close to the drone advancement medical scientists just made.

With the help of Columbia University andBrigham and Womens Hospital in Boston,scientists at Harvard Medical School created what theyre calling nano-sized drones that will be used for medical purposes and eventually biodegrade inside the body.

The report findingspublished last week in Science Translational Medicineexplain that the nanomedicines willdeliver a special type of healing molecule to fat deposits in arteries. This could become a new way to prevent heart attacks caused by atherosclerosis, which kills one in four people in the U.S. and is the countrys leading cause of death, according to a Harvard Med news article.

The inflammation-resolving targeted nanoparticles have shown exciting potential not only for the treatment of atherosclerosis as described here, but also in other therapeutic areas including wound repair,Omid Farokhzad,director of theLaboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials at Brigham and Womens, was reported saying in the Harvard news article.

In fact, it is the wound repair aspect of this technology that makes it so promising. Most scientists are developing drugs thatprevent heart attacks by tamping down inflammation, but years of such a drug regimen has negative side effects and treating inflammation alone isnt enough. Its the healing of the damage to the arterial walls that makes the difference, and that is what the new nanodrones will be addressing.

So far, the nonomedicines have tested successfully in mice. After a little fine-tuning, the scientists will beset tomove on to human testing.

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Amazon Who? Harvard Scientists Already Built Delivery Drones That Will Save Lives