"The live pig in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine was a common sight for Sylvain Martel, a nanorobotics researcher at Polytechnique Montréal in Canada, by the time he stepped into the imaging suite one evening in 2017. By then, Martel and his colleagues had spent more than a decade refining swarms of tiny robots that they could steer through the animals using the machine's magnetism. The hope was that such nanorobots could one day be a delivery vehicle for cancer-busting drugs."
"As the team watched the screen, the robots gradually shifted towards the liver, amassing there as a bright, flickering cloud. Compared with previous trials, in which the pigs were lying flat on their backs, placing them inside the MRI at a slight downward angle prompted an almost threefold increase in the number of robots that arrived at their destination. Martel says that even though the successful experiment only presaged more work, it nevertheless felt like a culmination of years of trial and error."
""All these years, we'd been diligently showing different steps of the process. We refined the technology, we showed that the robots could carry and administer drugs and now we'd shown that we could move them efficiently across human-scale distances," he says. Getting to this stage "took a long time, but it also feels like the next steps should go much faster"."
Researchers spent more than a decade refining swarms of tiny, magnetically steerable robots and testing them in pigs inside MRI machines. The robots were guided through branching arteries toward the liver by exploiting the MRI's magnetism and by changing the animal's positioning. Tilting the pig downward produced an almost threefold increase in robots reaching the target. The robots have demonstrated the ability to carry and administer drugs and to operate across human-scale distances in animal models. Late-stage animal research indicates potential roles in biopsies, surgeries, screening, and targeted cancer diagnosis, monitoring, and therapy. Significant engineering and safety validation remain before human deployment.
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