In a mind-altering development, a team of researchers in China has managed to treat brain tumors in mice by delivering drugs to the tissues using microscopic robots. The robots jumped out of the mice’s bloodstreams in their brains by being coated E coli, tricking the rodents’ immune systems into attacking them, absorbing the robots and the cancer-fighting drugs in the process.
The team’s investigation was published today in the journal Science Robotics. It comes on the heels previous research by members of the same team, who saw fluid-coated nanorobots being propelled at a distance through the gelatinous fluid of the eye. In addition to being an obvious recipe for an episode of “The Magic School Bus,” the study also had clear applications for ophthalmic research and medical treatment.
“It’s not just the blood-brain barrier,” lead author Zhiguang Wu, a chemist at the Harbin Institute for Technology in China, said in an email. “Most dense tissue barriers are difficult obstacles to overcome when moving microrobots around a body.”
The craft are magnetic, and the researchers use a rotating magnetic field to pull them around at a distance. On a microscale – we’re talking incremental movements of about 1% of the width of a hair – the studychers were able to use the hybrid bio-bots turn paths like in the video game Snake. They are called “neutrobots” because they infiltrate the brain into the shell of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell.
“The biggest challenge of the work was to obtain swarm intelligence from neutrobots,” Wu said. “Like macro-scale robotic swarms, the micro / nano robot swarms enable advanced manipulation to perform complex tasks.”
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It eventually took Wu’s team eight years to realize the microscopic robotic swarms capable of bridging the gap between rodent blood flow in the animal’s tail, where the bots were injected, and its brain, where gliomas – tumors that come from the glial cells of the brain – stayed. Part of the problem is that the mice’s white blood cells didn’t taste the taste of the magnetic robots. To solve that problem, Wu’s team coated the bots in pieces E coli membrane, which the white blood cells easily recognize as an unwanted invader. That made the robots much tastier, and the white blood cells enveloped them. From within those cells, the robots could then roll the cells to the brain; a Trojan horse for the 21st century (in this case, a horse that benefits the inhabitants of Troy). The neutrobots reached the brain and were able to deliver the drug directly to the targeted tumors.
Wu said the robots’ applications are many and there could be even more breakthroughs on the horizon. “The neutrobots are not designed exclusively for the treatment of glioma,” he said, explaining that they “provide a platform for the active delivery of various brain diseases such as cerebral thrombosis, apoplexy and epilepsy.”
Whether it’s surgery or drug delivery, robots are slowly but surely making their way into our most personal domains. Of course they are still in mouse brains for the time being, but future applications in humans appear increasingly likely.
“Using neutrophils in microrobot design is a fascinating strategy to overcome biological barriers,Robot engineers Junsun Hwang and Hongsoo Choi, who were not affiliated with the new work, wrote in an accompanying article“However, the translation from sofa to bed with regard to targeted drug delivery by neutrobots or microrobots is still a long way off.”
Currently, experts don’t have the ability to clearly see what the robots are doing in real time, which would be vital to 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 lifeless swarms in the direction of progress.