Robot fish that can swim medication through your veins

PanARMENIAN.Net - Robots could soon be invading your body for a good cause. As Digital Spy reports citing New Scientist, engineers have created metallic nanofish, inspired by the movements of real fish, which could be used to carry medication through your veins to specific sites.

Constructed from gold and nickel segments linked by silver hinges, the remarkable robot fish are 100 times smaller than a grain of sand. They can be guided by an external magnet which moves the nickel to cause a wave-like motion to propel the 'fish' forward, and increasing the magnet strength can speed up the nanofish's movement.

The robot fish were developed by Jinxing Li at the University of California and his colleagues, who are now looking into potential medical uses. "We believe they can be useful for medicine delivery, non-invasive surgery, and single cell manipulation," he explained.

Justin Gooding of the University of New South Wales in Australia is excited by the possibilities of the robot fish.

"A lot of work on drug delivery vehicles relies on the body's transport systems to move the particles to the site of the pathology," he outlined. "However, active transport has recently begun to be explored and this work shows that active transport particles can be made smaller and faster."

Li and his team are now working on developing biodegradable versions of the nanofish to solve the issue of how to remove the devices from the body after use, rather than getting metal stuck inside the body.

Other research groups are working on similar methods for medication transport, most of them inspired by the corkscrew tails of bacteria which experiments have shown to be less efficient than Li's creation.