Tiny robots swim through blood, deliver drugs — and then dissolve

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A remote-controlled robot the size of a grain of sand can swim through blood vessels to deliver drugs before dissolving into the body. The technology could allow doctors to administer small amounts of drugs to specific sites, avoiding the toxic side effects of body-wide therapies. The microrobots — guided by magnetic fields — work in blood vessels in pigs and sheep, researchers showed in a paper published in Science on 13 November1.
The system has yet to be trialled in people, but it shows promise because it works in a roughly human-sized body, and because all its components have already been shown to be biocompatible, says Bradley Nelson, a mechanical engineer at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, who co-led the work.