Bloodstream swimming 'fish' delivers drugs and detects toxins in human body

Microscopic fish can remove toxins from the bloodstream

Microfish, 3D-printed microbots have been developed at the University of California San Diego. The "smart" microbots were created to swim through bloodstreams to deliver drugs to specified places in the body. They can also sense and remove toxins.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The tiny fish are smaller than the width of a human hair. Researchers at UC San Diego explain that the fish are easy to create and are capable of acting as both a toxin sensing and detoxifying robots.

Nanoengineering Ph. D. student and co-first author Wei Zhu said, "We have developed an entirely new method to engineer nature-inspired microscopic swimmers that have complex geometric structures ... With this method, we can easily integrate different functions inside these tiny robotic swimmers for a broad spectrum of applications."

Discovery News reports, "Researchers used a high-resolution 3-D printing technology called microscale continuous optical printing to create the microfish ... The microfish have platinum nanoparticles in their tails which, when placed in a solution with hydrogen peroxide, undergo a chemical reaction to propel them forward. They're magnetically steered by way of iron oxide nanoparticle in their heads."

When the microbots are in a toxic environment they become fluorescent red and their glow intensifies as their toxin-neutralizing nanoparticles chemically bind with the toxins.

Jinxing Li, co-author of the study, stated, "Another exciting possibility we could explore is to encapsulate medicines inside the microfish and use them for directed drug delivery."

Researchers believe the microfish are the tip of the "smart" nanobot iceburg. As Discovery News reported: "The custom computer-aided design (CAD) program used could allow researchers to experiment with other shapes, such as sharks or birds, in the future."

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