Micro sized bio-inspired robots can bring a new wave of innovation in medical field.
Asiya S
Naturally occurring micro swimmers such as spermatozoa and bacteria exploit the no-slip boundary conditions to perform upstream motion along the wall | credits: Ahmed et al
Micro sized bio-inspired robots can bring a new wave of innovation in medical field. These wireless robots can carry and deliver drugs, genes or other substances to specific regions in our body without any highly invasive procedures this opening up new possibilities for treatment.
The tiny robots are inspired from biological micro swimmers (example bacteria, spermatozoa). Researchers at ETH Zurich and Helmholtz Institute Erlangen - Nürnberg for Renewable Energy had recently developed micro and nano sized robots from these inspiration and was published in Nature Machine Intelligence paper. These robots are capable of upstream mobility (flows opposite to the fluid(blood) flow) thus helping in targeted and precise delivery of drugs and genes and can also facilitate non-invasive surgeries.
The bio-inspired and wireless nanorobotic systems developed by Daniel Ahmed and his colleagues Exploit the non-slip boundary conditions of a wall for upstream movement in response to externally triggered acoustic and magnetic fields thus allowing the robot to deliver drug particles to parts of the body that is hard to reach. Since these robots does not require an onboard power supply or intricate moving parts (this making it smaller in size) and the fields used are safe, non-invasive and can penetrate deeply into human body, these robots can overcome the issues observed in other artificial micro swimmers.
In the future, this study could open up new exciting possibilities for performing targeted surgeries or in delivering substances to specific sites within the body through the vascular systems. This can also provide exciting opportunities in targeted therapeutics in the tumour vasculature.