Good news for rabbits, maybe great news soon for humans?
An international team of scientists has developed a drug delivery system that could one day treat human brain aneurysms in a way without the need for traditional surgery.
The team said it built billions of tiny simple magnetic nanorobots – each 300nm in diameter, or about a twentieth the width of a human red blood cell – that contain clotting medications. After injecting several hundred billion of these into a rabbit’s artery, the scientists used magnets and medical imaging technology to cause the bots to cluster together inside an aneurysm, according to the boffins.
The bots were then heated to their melting point. The process released a naturally occurring blood-clotting protein to prevent or stop the aneurysm bleeding into the brain, the researchers noted.
„Nanorobots are set to open new frontiers in medicine – potentially allowing us to carry out surgical repairs with fewer risks than conventional treatments and target drugs with pinpoint accuracy in hard-to-reach parts of the body“, argued Dr Qi Zhou, research associate at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, who co-led the study.
