Robots the length of a grain of rice could deliver antibiotics straight to the heart
Johns Hopkins engineers steer tiny robots to infected heart tissue with magnetic fields. It has already worked in heart models and on pig heart tissue – even against simulated blood flow.
Archive image · Photo: Tingtingou / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Engineers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have developed tiny robots designed to deliver drugs directly to infected heart tissue. The millirobots are about as wide as a pencil tip and as long as a grain of rice. They have no battery or motor and are steered from outside by an electromagnetic coil system similar to an MRI machine. The study led by medical roboticist Axel Krieger appeared in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies (DOI 10.1002/admt.71353); the university presented it on 12 October.
The robots work in pairs: a needle module latches onto the infected tissue and acts as a docking station, and a drug module docks with it and slowly releases antibiotics. In heart models and on real pig heart tissue, the robots moved smoothly and autonomously, even against simulated blood flow.
The aim is an alternative treatment for endocarditis, a heart infection that affects about 50,000 people in the US each year. Standard IV antibiotic treatment usually takes four to six weeks. First author Anuruddha Bhattacharjee said: “If everything works well, you go from four to six weeks of treatment to one day or less.” Next, the team plans tests in heart models that mimic a beating heart.