Anuruddha Bhattacharjee

Stories

Magnetic millirobots deliver drugs directly to a beating heart

Former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow

Johns Hopkins University engineers built a pair of magnetic robots the size of a pencil tip that are designed to travel through the bloodstream and put antibiotics directly on infected heart tissue. The robots carry no batteries or motors; coils outside the body, working on the same principle as an MRI machine, steer them. If it works in patients, the team says the procedure could take under an hour.

Updated Oct 26

Notable Quotes

Usually if you do IV drug treatment, you need four to six weeks of therapy. But with these robots the entire procedure might take 10 minutes—maybe an hour if you want to do a couple rounds.

from Magnetic millirobots deliver drugs directly to a beating heart · Updated Oct 26

Liver tumors, including metastatic tumors, could be particularly interesting because localized treatments delivered through blood vessels are already used in cancer care.

from Magnetic millirobots deliver drugs directly to a beating heart · Updated Oct 26

The key advantage is that we can actively guide and position these robots using external magnetic fields, rather than relying solely on how drugs circulate through the body.

from Magnetic millirobots deliver drugs directly to a beating heart · Updated Oct 26