Against the Flow

Salmon swim upstream, battling against all odds, because the prize at the end – a safe place to lay their eggs – is so great. Now scientists are trying to imbue microscopic nanorobots with the spirit of salmon to carry their own special package against the tide in our body’s veins to previously unreachable tumours. The microbots (shown first in the video) are half covered in gold material that lets researchers steer them with a magnetic field, and half covered in special anti-cancer drugs, ready to be deployed once they reach their destination. The drugs latch on to cancer cells (top, later in the video), but pass by others (bottom), meaning they can fight the disease without damaging anything else. The bots roll along the inside edge of veins where blood flow is slower, but have only been tested in artificial veins. The next step is releasing them in the real thing.

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 and video from work by Yunus Alapan and Ugur Bozuyuk, and colleagues
• Physical Intelligence Department, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany
• Image copyright held by and reproduced with permission from the AAAS; movie copyright held by the original authors
• Published in Science Robotics, May 2020