Golden Balls
Getting medicine to precisely where it’s needed in the body is like trying to get a hole-in-one in golf. You have a much better chance of hitting the target if you can nudge it along the way a few times. Now researchers have developed medicine-carrying ball-shaped microbots that can be pushed towards where they’re needed most. Using a new imaging technique that highlights both microbots and tumours in the digestive tract, researchers track the tiny spheres of gold-coated magnesium (pictured). Bubbles shooting out of a hole propel the spheres towards trouble, and when they arrive at the target area the drugs are released as researchers fire a burst of infrared light through the body, melting a waxy sealant layer. This precision approach could make drug delivery much more accurate, making more efficient and effect treatments par for the course.
Written by Anthony Lewis
- Image from work by Zhiguang Wu and Lei Li, and colleagues
- California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
- Image reprinted with permission from the AAAS — the American Association for the Advancement of Science
- Published in Science Robotics, July 2019
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