The Future of Non-Invasive Medicine: Millirobots

Credit: Zhao Lab

A biomedical researcher from Stanford University has developed a very small robot or millirobot that can travel through a person’s body and transport medicine to targeted areas.

Being extremely tiny, the millirobot has the potential to reach very tight areas of the body that it can explore and where it can bring drugs. The device is the size of a fingertip and it can swim, crawl and even spin, providing a very promising perspective into the future of medicine.

Due to their versatility and ability to target specific areas in the body, millirobots can become a very good alternative for traditional drugs, which don’t usually treat a precise pain point, but target a wider spectrum of affections. By comparison, the tiny devices can directly reach the affected area and release medicine that is only meant for that specific area.

Renee Zhao, the lead researcher for the millirobots, is a mechanical engineer and has been working on multiple similar projects. According to SciTechDaily, “her robots can self-select various locomotive states and navigate obstacles within the body because they are powered by magnetic fields, which allow for continuous motion and can be applied instantaneously to produce torque.”

One of Zhao’s latest creations, a magnetic millirobot, was displayed on the cover of the Science Advances publication, crawling inside a stomach. The crawling device uses magnetic fields to move, which also makes it possible for it to change its direction. Furthermore, the millirobots can go around various obstacles they encounter in the body and choose different ways to move.

The official page of Stanford University’s Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute states that “just by shifting the strength and orientation of the magnetic field, Zhao’s team can send the robot sailing across the body at distances in a single leap that are 10 times the robot’s length.”

The small medical devices pave the way for a new type of medicine, which is more targeted and less invasive than any traditional methods used so far.

Irina Aurelia

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