Destined to Deliver

Imagine a determined bicycle courier tackling tricky terrain, fighting fierce headwinds, and navigating an unlit maze of roads to deliver urgent treatments to a patient in remote isolation. Such is the journey of a MANiAC ('magnetically aligned nanorods in alginate capsules'), tiny robots designed to deliver drugs to hard-to-reach spots in the body. The small, soft robots can move against the current, tumble up slopes and navigate through tissue, all controlled by magnetic fields (pictured in different test situations, and then depositing dyes around rat brain and mouse spinal cord material). Precise delivery of drugs, particularly for diseases in the central nervous system, can help with difficult-to-treat conditions while minimising the impact on other regions. Overcoming the physical challenges of navigating the body is essential to making this technology functional, ultimately providing precise packages of treatment where it is needed most for patients everywhere.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video (adapted) from work by Lamar O. Mair and colleagues
• Multi-Scale Robotics and Automation Lab, School of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, July 2021