One of these, Bionaut, raised $43 million earlier this year to take its therapy into phase 1 trials. There are at least four startups working on medical microrobots that could travel “untethered” inside the body. What makes Nelson optimistic that these technologies are on their way? Some such robots have made their way off the lab bench and into large animals, including pigs. “So we can use stronger doses and maybe we can rethink the way we treat some of these diseases,” Nelson says. In a perspective published in Science today, Nelson and his coauthor Salvador Pané argue that these tiny machines could help deliver drugs exactly where they are needed. And they could be a game changer for a number of serious diseases. They’re coming, says Brad Nelson, who works in robotics at ETH Zürich. We’ve been hearing about the use of tiny robots in medicine for years, maybe even decades. Okay, I know what you’re probably thinking. They could break up hard-to-reach clots, deliver drugs to even the most inaccessible tumors, and even help guide embryos toward implantation. But imagine if we could deploy armies of tiny robots into the body to do the job for us. Illness is often caused by problems that are hard to visualize and difficult to access. The human body is a labyrinth of vessels and tubing, full of barriers that are difficult to break through.
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