In an incredible development, a team of researchers in China have managed to treat brain tumors in mice by administering drugs to tissues using microscopic robots. The robots jumped from the blood streams of the mice to the brain as they were coated E. coli, which tricked rodents ’immune systems into attacking them, absorbing robots and cancer drugs in the process.
The team’s investigation was published today in the journal Science Robotics. Comes about previous research by members of the same team, who saw that liquid-coated nanorobots moved remotely through the eye fluid in a gelatinous manner. 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,” lead author Zhiguang Wu, a chemist at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, said in an email. “Most dense tissue barriers are difficult obstacles to overcome when moving microrobots around a body.”
Crafts are magnetic and researchers use a rotating magnetic field to pull them away. At the microscopic scales – we are talking about incremental movements of approximately 1% of the width of a hair – the researchthe chers were able to do the hybrid bio-bots travel paths like in the video game Snake. Known as “neutrobots” because they infiltrate the brain into the carcass of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell.
“The biggest challenge of the job was how to get a swarm of neutrobot swarms,” Wu said. “Like robot swarms in the macroscale world, micro / nanorobot swarms allow for sophisticated manipulation to perform complex tasks.”
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Ultimately, Wu’s team took eight years to update the microscopic swarms of robots capable of bridging the gap between the bloodstream of rodents in the animal’s tail, where the robots were injected, and its brain. , where the gliomas resided, tumors that emerge from the glial cells of the brain. . Part of the problem is that the white blood cells in the mice did not dig into the taste of the magnetic robots. To overcome this problem, Wu’s team covered the boats in pieces E. coli membrane, which white blood cells easily recognize as an unwanted invader. This made the robots much nicer and the white blood cells surround them. From inside these cells, robots were able to roll the cells toward the brain; a Trojan horse for the 21st century (in this case, which benefits Trojan residents). Neutrobots reached the brain and were able to administer the drug directly to target tumors.
Wu said the applications of the robots are multiple and that more advances could be made on the horizon. “Neutrobots are not designed exclusively for the treatment of glioma,” he said, explaining that they are “a platform for active delivery for the therapy of various brain diseases such as cerebral thrombosis, stroke and epilepsy.”
Whether it’s surgery or drug supply, robots are slowly but surely opening up to our more personal domains. Of course, for now they only have mouse brains, but it looks like future applications in humans increasingly likely.
“The use of neutrophils in the design of microrobots is a fascinating strategy to overcome biological barriers,“Robotic engineers Junsun Hwang and Hongsoo Choi, who were not affiliated with the new job, wrote in a companion article. “However, the bank’s translation at the top with respect to the specific delivery of drugs by neutrobots or microrobots is still a long way off.”
Currently, experts do not have the ability to clearly see what robots are doing in real time, which would be vital to any medical use of line droids. But in the rat race of robotic research, it is clear that humans are pushing their inanimate swarms in the direction of progress.