Researchers have long dreamt of the day when tiny robots would be able to swim inside our bodies to fix things that go wrong, kill cancer cells, and deliver medicine, just like in the movie Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine crew is shrunk down to treat a blood clot. While researchers aren’t exactly following the Hollywood script, they are making strides in fields such as nanomedicine and bioremediation.
Nanomedicine is the application of nanodevices—machines and biological devices engineered at the nano-scale—to deliver drugs, improve imaging and sensing, and repair damaged cells and tissues.
Researchers in the field have started designing microrobots that are able to swim through the body, but these robots require complex fabrication and an energy source. What if researchers were able to harness nature’s own version of a microrobot—swimming cells—and could direct these cells to specific areas within the body?
