They are unbelievably small, thinner than the width of a human hair, and they may someday provide targeted pharmaceutical therapies inside your body. The bots move around a host using magnetic nanoparticles and their tests in mice hold promising results. Veuer’s Tony Spitz has the details.
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00:00These are what researchers at the California Institute of Technology call
00:03microbots.
00:04They are unbelievably small, thinner than the width of a human hair,
00:07and they may someday provide targeted pharmaceutical therapies
00:10inside your body. Micro nanorobots have the high potential
00:14to navigate through the hard-to-reach environment of the human body
00:19for precision surgery or drug delivery.
00:22This is Wei Gao, professor of medical engineering at Caltech.
00:25He explains that the tiny robots utilize magnetic nanoparticles,
00:29letting researchers control their movement via external magnetic fields.
00:32This could potentially allow doctors to direct the microbots to a particular
00:36location within a human body,
00:37and then direct them to release targeted therapies, meaning absolute real-time
00:41control of how, when,
00:42and where pharmaceuticals are released. The researchers have already been
00:46testing the microbots inside mice,
00:48treating bladder tumors with targeted therapies. Over a
00:5121-day treatment period, we see a substantial decrease in tumor size
00:57in the mice when treated with a microrobot.
01:00They say this is a substantial find, with the targeted therapy shrinking tumors
01:04better than traditional delivery systems.