Golden Balls

Getting medicine to precisely where it’s needed in the body is like trying to get a hole-in-one in golf. You have a much better chance of hitting the target if you can nudge it along the way a few times. Now researchers have developed medicine-carrying ball-shaped microbots that can be pushed towards where they’re needed most. Using a new imaging technique that highlights both microbots and tumours in the digestive tract, researchers track the tiny spheres of gold-coated magnesium (pictured). Bubbles shooting out of a hole propel the spheres towards trouble, and when they arrive at the target area the drugs are released as researchers fire a burst of infrared light through the body, melting a waxy sealant layer. This precision approach could make drug delivery much more accurate, making more efficient and effect treatments par for the course.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Zhiguang Wu and Lei Li, and colleagues
• California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
• Image reprinted with permission from the AAAS - the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Published in Science Robotics, July 2019