In a mind-blowing development, a team of researchers in China has been treating brain tumors in mice by delivering drugs to the cigarettes using microscopic robots. The robots jumped from the bloodstream of the mice into their brains by covering them in. E. coli, which affected the rodents’ immune systems to attack them, including the robots and cancer-fighting drugs in the process.
The team was researching published today in the journal Science Robotics. It comes on the heels of previous research with members of the same team, who saw liquid-coated nanorobots moved away through eye-like liquids. As well as being an obvious recipe for a program of “The Magic School Bus,” the research had obvious applications for the study of ophthalmology and medical treatments.
“It’s not just the blood-brain barrier,” lead author Zhiguang Wu, a chemist at Harbin Institute of Technology in China, said in an email. “Most of the obstacles in thick cigarettes are the obstacles to moving microrobots around the body.”
The crafts are magnetic, and the researchers use a rotating magnetic field to drag them around a distance. On microscales – we are talking about gradual movements of about 1% of hair width – the researcherhe could chers the hybrid bio-bots wend paths as in the video game Snake. These are called “neutrobots” oir they encapsulate the brain in a coating of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell.
“The biggest challenge in the job was how to get smart information from neutrobots,” Wu said. “Like robot swarms in the macroscale world, the micro / nanorobot swarms enable solemn manipulation to perform complex tasks. ”
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It took Wu’s eight years to eventually make the microscopic robot servants enable the gap between the rodent’s bloodstream in the animal’s tail, where the bots were inserted, and its brain , where gliomas – tumors emanating from the glial cells of the brain – lived. . Part of the case is that the white blood cells of the mice did not dig up the taste of the magnetic robots. To overcome that issue, Wu’s team covered the bots in pieces of E. coli membrane, which the white blood cells readily recognize as an unwelcome invader. That made the robots much tastier, and the white blood cells covered them. From within these cells, the robots were able to roll the cells toward the brain; Trojan horse for the 21st century (in this case, one that benefits the inhabitants of Troy). The neutrobots entered the brains and were able to deliver the drug directly to the targeted tumors.
Wu said the claims of robots are multiplying, and more disruptions could be on the horizon. “The neutrobots are not just designed to treat glioma,” he said, explaining that they are “a platform for active delivery for the treatment of several brain diseases such as cerebral thrombosis, apoplexy, and epilepsy. . ”
Whether it’s surgery or drug delivery, robots are slow but sure are making their way into our most intimate realms. Of course, they’re still just in a mouse ‘s brain for now, but there seem to be future applications in humans. increasingly likely.
“The use of neutrophils in microrobot design is a remarkable strategy for overcoming biological barriers,”“Robot engineers Junsun Hwang and Hongsoo Choi, who were not involved in the new work, wrote in a collection article. “However, mountain-to-bed translation of targeted drug delivery by neutrobots or microrobots is still a long way off.”
Currently, experts are unable to see clearly what the robots are doing in real time, which would be crucial for any medical use of the droids down the line. But in the rat race of robotics research, it’s clear that humans are pushing their unstable swarms of progress.