Sea cucumbers bring inspiration! The future of drug delivery
Scientists at Sun Yat-sen University, Zhejiang University, and Carnegie Mellon University have recently developed a phase-shifting material that can turn from solid to liquid, escape from its prison and then return to its original shape. According to the experts, the material possesses a wide variety of capabilities, offering a wide range of applications in biomedicine, including the removal of foreign substances in the body and the targeted administration of drugs.
Traditional robots lack flexibility in their shape, but soft robots that have appeared in recent years are more pliable but often less powerful, and their motion is more difficult to manage. "If robots can flip between liquid and solid phases, they may be able to execute additional functions," research co-first author Chengfeng Pan, Ph.D. remarked.
The researchers were inspired by aquatic organisms like sea cucumbers and octopuses, which can modify the hardness of their tissues to adapt to changes in their environment. By burying magnetic particles in metallic gallium, they created a novel form of phase transition material. "The magnetic particles serve two purposes," explains one of the paper's corresponding authors, Dr. Carmel Majidi of Carnegie Mellon University. "On the one hand, they render this material sensitive to magnetic field modifications by heating it to cause phase shifts. And the magnetic particles enable the robots to move, allowing them to respond to changes in the magnetic field."
By adjusting the magnetic field, the scientists were able to steer the robot from a solid to a liquid condition past intentionally constructed barriers in this research. According to Dr. Pan, the material might be employed in real-world scenarios to tackle particular medical and technical concerns. Medical applications are one area of great interest to the researchers.
The researchers illustrate the potential of this material as a drug delivery vehicle in their study. They contained the drug in a phase change material, and the solid "pill" soon reached the model's stomach, where it could be converted to a liquid form by a magnetic field, releasing the drug encased in it, and then the "pill" was destroyed. The "pill" then solidifies and is ejected from the body. This substance can also be utilized to encircle and eject foreign items from the stomach.
"In this article, we demonstrated proof of concept, but additional research is needed to identify how it may be employed for drug delivery or foreign body removal. In the future, we will continue to study the potential of these robots for applications in biological settings," stated Dr. Carmel Majidi.
This phase transition material is simply the latest in a long line of breakthroughs in the developing field of microrobots. Microrobot advancements have enabled them to crawl through human veins, learn to swim, and soar through the air. In a media interview, Brad Nelson, professor of robotics at ETH Zurich, stated that one of the most exciting areas of study for microbots is their therapeutic applications, including delivering drugs to the brain or treating blood clots.