Microbot Designed to Be Driven Through Blood Vessels

Korean scientists are developing microscopic-scale medical robots that represent a new type of therapeutic technology. As anticipated, the microbots, which are less than 1 mm in size, may someday be able to travel throughout the human bloodstream to deliver drugs to specific targets or hunt and destroy tumors, blood clots, and infections that cannot be easily accessed in other ways.

One hurdle in the utilization of microbots, however, is developing a system to effectively “drive’ them and steer them through the complicated and intricate circulatory system, to a defined destination. Researchers from Hanyang University (Seoul, Korea) and Chonnam National University (Gwangju, Korea) described at the American Institute of Physics’ (AIP) Proceedings of the 56th annual conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, held in Scottsdale (AZ, USA), in November 2011, a new navigation system that employed an external magnetic field to generate two distinctive types of microbot movements: helical, which push the microbots forward or backward, or even allow them to “dig” into blood clots or other obstructions; and translational, which allow the ‘bots to, for example, swerve into one side of a branched artery. In laboratory experiments, the researchers used the system to steer accurately a microbot through a mock blood vessel filled with water.

The research, according to the scientists, could be extended to the “precise and effective manipulation of a microbot in several organs of the human body, such as the central nervous system, the urinary system, the eye, and others.”

The study’s findings were part of the Proceedings of the 56th annual conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, planned for publication in the Journal of Applied Physics in April 2012. The research was also published December 16, 2011, in a journal of the American Institute of Physics.

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Hanyang University
Chonnam National University