Communications of the ACM
Researchers Send Tiny Drug Delivery Robots Into Mouse Brains
Researchers treated gliomas in mice but said neutrobots could also deliver therapy for other brain diseases.
Credit: Getty Images
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 from the mice's bloodstreams into their brains by being coated in E. coli, which tricked the rodents' immune systems into attacking them, absorbing the robots and the cancer-fighting drugs in the process.
The team describes its research in "Dual-Responsive Biohybrid Neutrobots for Active Target Delivery," published in the journal Science Robotics.
The nanobots are magnetic, and the researchers used a rotating magnetic field to pull them around remotely. They're dubbed "neutrobots" because they infiltrate the brain in the casing of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell.
"The neutrobots developed in this study provide a promising pathway to precision biomedicine in the future," the researchers say.
From Gizmodo
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