newly published in Advanced Materials Technologies<\/a>.<\/p>\nSwifter delivery of antibiotics for heart conditions could revolutionise treatment<\/p>\n
Each year about 50,000 people in the United States contract endocarditis, a heart tissue infection. The typical treatment is a weeks-long course of intravenous antibiotics, which often fails because the drugs are too diluted by the time they reach the heart. Doctors are then left with two risky choices\u2014prescribing more and higher doses of antibiotics, which can be toxic, or extremely risky open-heart surgery.<\/p>\n
To get the drugs directly to the infected heart tissue, the team developed magnetically-powered robots called \u201cmillirobots,\u201d because of their size\u2014they\u2019re as wide as a pencil tip or a matchstick head, and about as long as a grain of rice.<\/p>\n
The robots work in pairs. There\u2019s one the team calls the needle module, which gently latches onto heart tissue right at the infected site. There it serves as a docking station, waiting right on the beating heart for the drug module. The drug module carries medicine to the docking station, where it magnetically docks and slowly releases the antibiotics right where they\u2019re most needed.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Both robots are magnetic and guided wirelessly by an external electromagnetic coil system that works like an MRI machine.<\/p>\n
Having two tiny robots instead of one larger one allows the device to reach tight spots in the body. The needle can remain docked while the drug module is replaced, allowing for repeat doses of medicine if needed.<\/p>\n
\u201cMagnetic guidance is exciting because you don\u2019t have to power the robot itself. It doesn\u2019t carry batteries and motors,\u201d Krieger said. \u201cThe drugs can be delivered safely, with technology like the gradients and fields in an MRI. But instead of using it for imaging, it drives the millirobots.\u201d<\/p>\n
The researchers successfully tested the robots on phantom heart models that closely mimic a human heart, and on real porcine heart tissue. The robots traveled smoothly and autonomously, even against simulated blood flow.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can just inject a robot with a little pill into your vein where it travels to the site, right to where we really need to deliver the drugs, and it\u2019s minimally invasive,\u201d said first author Anuruddha Bhattacharjee, a former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral student who is now an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.<\/p>\n
In addition to eliminating the need for open-heart surgery, drug treatment with the robots could take hours instead of weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsually 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\u2014maybe an hour if you want to do a couple rounds,\u201d Bhattacharjee said. \u201cIf everything works well, you go from four to six weeks of treatment to one day or less.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team also believes the robots would be helpful delivering targeted medications to fight cancer where it\u2019s spreading<\/p>\n
The researchers next plan to test the robots in more realistic phantom hearts, with muscle contraction and the beating movement of a real heart.<\/p>\n
The work was supported by the National Science Foundation\u2019s Foundational Research in Robotics CAREER program, award 2144348.<\/p>\n
Authors include Xinhao Chen, Adam May, Ayush Saraswat, Chintan Panigrahi, Yash Chadda and Joseph Katz of Johns Hopkins; Suraj Raval and Yancy Diaz-Mercado of the University of Maryland; and Lamar O. Mair of Weinberg Medical Physics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Engineers at John Hopkins University have developed robots the size of a pencil tip intended to travel through…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":931687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[49,48,84,36348,36349,3387],"class_list":["post-931686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-health-technology","tag-medical-science","tag-robotics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/931687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}