In a wonderful development, a team of researchers from China managed to treat brain tumors in mice by delivering drugs to tissues using microscopic robots. The robots jumped out of the mice’s bloodstream into their brains, being covered And there, which tricked the rodents’ immune system into attacking them by absorbing robots and cancer-fighting drugs in the process.
The team’s research was published today in the journal Science Robotics. He’s coming for the heel previous research by members of the same team, who saw liquid-coated nanorobots propelled from a distance through the eye fluid like jelly. In addition to being an obvious recipe for an episode of The Magic School Bus, the research had obvious applications for ophthalmic research and medical treatments.
“It’s not just the blood-brain barrier,” said lead author Zhiguang Wu, a chemist at China’s Harbin Institute for Technology, in an email. “Most dense tissue barriers are difficult obstacles to overcome in moving microrobots around a body.”
The crafts are magnetic, and researchers use a rotating magnetic field to shoot them from a distance. At the microscale – we are talking about incremental movements of about 1% the width of a hair – researdear they could do hybrid bio-robots follow the paths as in the video game Snake. They are called “neutrobots” because it infiltrates the brain into the shell of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell.
“The biggest challenge of the work was how to get neutrobot intelligence in the swarm,” Wu said. “Like robotic swarms in the macroscale world, micro / nanorobot swarms allow sophisticated manipulation to perform complex tasks.”
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Finally, it took Wu’s team eight years to update the robot’s microscopic swarms that could put an end to the gap between the blood flow of rodents in the animal’s tail, where the robots were injected, and his brain, where the gliomas lived – tumors coming out of the glial cells of the brain -. . Part of the problem is that the white blood cells of the mice did not dig into the aroma of magnetic robots. To overcome this problem, Wu’s team covered the robots into pieces And there membrane, which white blood cells easily recognize as an unwanted invader. This made the robots much more pleasant, and the white blood cells enveloped them. From inside those cells, the robots were then able to roll the cells toward the brain; a Trojan horse for the 21st century (in this case, one that benefits the inhabitants of Troy). Neutrobes reached the brain and managed to deliver the drug directly to the targeted tumors.
Wu said the applications of the robots are multiple and that there could be more discoveries on the horizon. “Neutrobats are not designed exclusively for the treatment of glioma,” he said, explaining that they are “an active delivery platform for the treatment of various brain diseases, such as cerebral thrombosis, stroke and epilepsy.”
Whether it’s surgery or medication, robots are slowly but surely making their way into our most personal areas. Of course, for now they are still in the brains of mice, but the future applications in humans seem more and more likely.
“The use of neutrophils in microrobot design is a fascinating strategy for overcoming biological barriers,“Robotic engineers Junsun Hwang and Hongsoo Choi, who were not affiliated with the new work, wrote in a companion article. “However, the translation from bank to nightstand in terms of targeted drug delivery by neutrobots or microbots is still a long way off.”
Currently, experts lack the ability to see clearly what robots are doing in real time, which would be vital for any medical use of droids on the line. But in the race of robotic research rats, it is clear that humans are pushing their inanimate swarms in the direction of progress.