Could tiny robots replace open-heart surgery?
Robots the size of a pencil tip could travel through the body to deliver medicine to infections inside a beating heart.
Scientists have developed pencil-sized robots designed to travel through the body and deliver medicine to infections within a beating heart. These microbots, aimed at replacing risky open-heart surgery and ineffective IV-drug therapy for life-threatening heart infections, could also be utilized for treating other hard-to-reach diseases like cancer.
The senior author, Axel Krieger, a medical roboticist, highlights that these tiny robots, guided by magnetic fields similar to MRI technology, allow for precise and less invasive treatment right at the infection site. The development of these millirobots could significantly improve treatment outcomes, potentially reducing the need for lengthy courses of antibiotics or risky surgery.
Each year, about 50,000 people in the United States contract endocarditis, a heart tissue infection that currently requires weeks-long intravenous antibiotic treatment, often leading to ineffective therapy. The robots, tested successfully on heart models and real porcine tissue, demonstrate the potential for rapid, targeted drug delivery, with procedures potentially taking just minutes to hours instead of weeks. Future tests will include more realistic heart simulations to further validate their effectiveness.
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