For a start, the group wants to make the machines fully biodegradable so that they would eventually dissolve in the body. He added that the team has a lot of work to do before microrobots can travel through real human bodies. Such a steady flow of medicine could allow patients to receive more drugs over a longer span of time, Lee said, improving outcomes for patients. Once there, the machines slowly released their dexamethasone over the course of about two days. The result was a real-life Fantastic Voyage: The microrobots dispersed through the organs before sticking onto the bladder walls, which would likely make them difficult to pee out. They then introduced thousands of those bots into the bladders of lab mice. In laboratory experiments, the researchers fabricated schools of microrobots encapsulating high concentrations of dexamethasone. Lee believes that microrobots may be able to provide some relief. Often, patients have to come into a clinic several times over a period of weeks where a doctor injects a harsh solution of dexamethasone into the bladder through a catheter. Treating the disease can be equally uncomfortable. Interstitial cystitis, also known as painful bladder syndrome, affects millions of Americans and, as its name suggests, can cause severe pelvic pain. To take their microrobots for a test drive, the researchers set their sights on a common problem for humans: bladder disease. Other CU Boulder co-authors of the new study include Nick Bottenus, assistant professor of mechanical engineering Ankur Gupta, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering and engineering graduate students Ritu Raj, Cooper Thome, Nicole Day and Payton Martinez. If you expose the machines to an acoustic field, like the kind used in ultrasound, the bubbles will begin to vibrate wildly, pushing water away and shooting the robots forward. They also include a little something extra: Each of the robots carries a small bubble of trapped air, similar to what happens when you dunk a glass upside-down in water. The machines look a bit like small rockets and come complete with three tiny fins. The team makes its microrobots out of materials called biocompatible polymers using a technology similar to 3D printing. He imagines that, just like in the movie, microrobots could swirl through a person's blood stream, seeking out targeted areas to treat for various ailments. Today, we are living in an era of micrometer- and nanometer-scale robots," Lee said. In the classic film Fantastic Voyage, a group of adventurers travels via a shrunken-down submarine into the body of a man in a coma. If that sounds like something ripped from science fiction, that's because it is. Wyatt Shields, a co-author of the new study and assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering. "Microscale robots have garnered a lot of excitement in scientific circles, but what makes them interesting to us is that we can design them to perform useful tasks in the body," said C. The results suggest that microrobots may be a useful tool for treating bladder diseases and other illnesses in people.
In the new study, the group deployed fleets of these machines to transport doses of dexamethasone, a common steroid medication, to the bladders of lab mice.
That's many times faster than a cheetah in relative terms. They're also really fast, capable of traveling at speeds of about 3 millimeters per second, or roughly 9,000 times their own length per minute. Each one measures only 20 micrometers wide, several times smaller than the width of a human hair. The group's microrobots are really small. Lee and his colleagues aren't there yet, but the new research is big step forward for tiny robots. "Instead of cutting into the patient, we can simply introduce the robots to the body through a pill or an injection, and they would perform the procedure themselves." "Imagine if microrobots could perform certain tasks in the body, such as non-invasive surgeries," said Jin Lee, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. The researchers describe their mini healthcare providers in a paper published last month in the journal Small.
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