One of the great problems of modern medicine in the treatment of different human ailments is the “killing flies with cannon” approach. This means that when we have a headache and we take paracetamol, this medicine is distributed throughout the body and not only where it needs to take effect. But this is something that may end up changing thanks to microrobots.
The importance. That the medication ‘walks’ throughout the body seems completely irrelevant as long as it has its analgesic effect, but the reality is that it is the responsible for many side effects that are generated. For example, taking a simple ibuprofen to relieve pain or reduce inflammation seems like a wonderful thing.
But the fact that it has a general effect on the body also causes the blocking of mucus production in the stomach, which can lead to one of its most ‘famous’ side effects, such as the generation of stomach ulcers when abused.
And when we talk about the much more serious side effects, it can cause many clinical trials of new drugs to have to be stopped because of this. But simply with a system that makes the medication act in a specific place in the body, this problem could be alleviated (in part).
A new advance. A team of researchers from ETH Zurich has published in the magazine Science a solution that brings us a little closer to the setting of the movie Amazing Journey: a platform of magnetic microrobots ready for clinical use that are capable of traveling through blood vessels and releasing their cargo into the affected tissue.
Bradley J. Nelson, co-author of the study and professor of robotics at ETH Zurich, says this is just the beginning: “We’re just the tip of the iceberg. I think surgeons are going to look at this and I’m sure they’ll have a lot of ideas about how to use it.”
A simple grain of sand. In this case we are not talking about a metal robot with gears, but rather a capsule of approximately 1.69 mm in diameter that is designed to dissolve inside the body. We can rest assured that we will not have thousands of grains of metal sand in our bloodstream.
But to get here, the engineering behind it is not at all simple. One of the challenges, logically, is that its application would be viable within the human body. To do this, the team had to balance three key factors such as: biocompatibility, drug loading capacity and magnetic control. The result was a spherical gelatin matrix that has three components:
- Iron oxide nanoparticles to respond to magnetic fields.
- Tantalum: a dense metal that can be ‘seen’ through radiology techniques in order to follow its path through the body.
- The medication you want to apply.
How it moves. In addition to the capsule, what is important is how it moves until it reaches the target where it must act. For this, an electromagnetic navigation system called Navion is used. To do this, coils are placed around the patient’s head to generate a magnetic field around it that allows the capsule to move.
In this way, a surgeon, for example, will be able to control the capsule almost as if it were a remote-controlled car to be able to reach the desired action point. To do this, there are different ways of moving through the vessels: by rolling, by dragging or by navigating the blood flow itself.
A suicide mission. Once this microrobot reaches its destination, the doctor will be able to activate the final phase. Using high-frequency alternating magnetic fields, the iron nanoparticles inside will heat up, which will cause the gelatin matrix to melt in a matter of 40 seconds, releasing the drug at once.
In their tests, they managed to transport rtPA (a powerful drug to dissolve thrombi) to a clot in a vascular model, managing to restore blood flow in less than 20 minutes.
When will it reach the hospitals? Although the system is quite promising, it will take time to reach patients. The researcher himself points out that clinical trials could begin within three to five years. In addition to thrombi, applications are being considered to treat aneurysms, arteriovenous malformations and very aggressive types of brain cancer.
It’s not the first time. The medicine every time tends more towards personalization of treatments. In cancer we already see it with use of therapies such as CAR-T which focuses on training the immune system to specifically attack a person’s tumor cells and not healthy cells. A completely targeted therapy like the one proposed in this system, but in this case it is applied in the daily clinic (although it has a very high cost).
The same happens with the immunotherapy with the use of antibodies. In this case, science looks for those particles that are unique to tumor cells and that are not present in healthy cells. In this way, drug weapons can be created that directly attack cancer cells.
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