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Microbots have been a hot topic within the miniaturization trend for a long fourth dimension. Developments in the medical robotics field ranging from tiny experimental robots that can swim through the bloodstream to origami-like creations designed to exist swallowed. Merely 1 of the more than troublesome problems is figuring out how to command microbots once they're released. That's where Selman Sakar, Hen-Wei Huang, and Bradley Nelson come in. These researchers have invented a new type of microbot that might be the beginning of a revolution in how nosotros deliver medication to the torso.

Tiny, important confetti

Scientists at EPFL and ETHZ take developed a new method for building microbots that could be used in the trunk to deliver drugs and perform other medical operations (Credit: EPFL)

The trio of researchers is working on microbots that can move about, and tin can also be produced chop-chop and in quantity. The prototypes they describe in this Nature Communications report are soft, flexible, and motorless. Inspired by the shapes of actual microbes, particularly the mighty morphin' Trypanosoma brucei, (one of the parasitic protozoans that causes African sleeping sickness), the microbots take the shape of either flat heads and helical tails, or only straight-up tiny helices. They're made using bio-compatible polymers and hydrogels, and good onetime iron (3) oxide to make them magnetically responsive. And the result is a 500μm-wide cosmos that can exist controlled using an electromagnetic field, capable of altering its shape in response to the temperature of its surroundings.

Sakar at EPFL and Huang and Nelson at ETHZ are developing and testing a number of configurations of microbots that can not only move about, merely can be produced quickly and in quantity using a new manufacturing technique. The result is a robot that can exist controlled using an electromagnetic field — switching the direction of the field could steer the robots through their fluid bath. When the flock of microbots gets to its destination, the bots can change their shape in response to temperature — in this case, the researchers used lasers of detail non-ionizing wavelengths. At forty°C, which is about the temperature of a wicked fever, the microbots' rubberband modulus changes and they lay themselves out flat, exposing their hydrophilic insides to the bloodstream.

This class of medical microbots could exist useful for everything from drug delivery to microsurgery, clearing out clogged arteries and the like. Enquiry into microbots has been driven by a number of factors, including the ability to evangelize highly targeted treatments to specific areas of the torso and the power to perform certain types of repair or handling without causing additional trauma.

1 of the challenges of chemotherapy, for example, is the difficulty of delivering anti-cancer drugs directly to the cancerous growth without impacting surrounding salubrious tissue. Chemotherapy is frequently bluntly described every bit a series of treatments designed to impale cancer at least slightly faster than the residue of the patient — and ane of the problems with many anti-cancer drugs is that at the loftier doses required to kill a significant percentage of cancer cells kill a great many normal cells every bit well. Targeted, location-specific therapy works well for sure cancers, just this assumes that the growth or tissue tin can be isolated and that the treatment can be localized. Cancer is a many-headed hydra with far likewise many heads to be cured by any single treatment — but the power to evangelize targeted drug regimens to specific locations could significantly improve mortality rates for certain types of cancer.