Pencil-tip robots deliver drugs directly inside a beating heart
Wireless magnetic millirobots that deliver medicine inside the beating heart
Johns Hopkins engineers have created magnetic millirobots the size of a pencil tip that could replace open-heart surgery and ineffective IV antibiotics for endocarditis, which affects 50,000 Americans yearly. Working in pairs, a needle module docks onto infected heart tissue while a drug module magnetically attaches and releases medication on site. Guided wirelessly by an external coil system like an MRI, the robots were tested on phantom and porcine hearts. The team says treatment could shrink from weeks to under an hour.
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.