Against the Flow

Platelets are tiny blood cells that usually glide through the bloodstream on the prevailing current like an empty canoe drifting down a river, but researchers are trying to find ways to load them with precious cargo and a motor to steer them with greater precision. By loading a platelet up with disease-fighting drugs and coating one side of it with a particular protein, a new technique powers them against the current and directly to wherever they’re needed most. In lab tests, the coating reacted with the body’s natural waste fluid and fizzed the platelets (pictured, red) forward, until they reached and locked on to a set target, such as a cancer cell (purple). This approach, harnessing the body’s natural tools, to precisely deliver drugs avoids the problems of compatibility met by attempts to use artificial nanorobots instead, and could help turn the tide against hard-to-reach conditions like cancer.

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 Songsong Tang, Fangyu Zhang and Hua Gong, and colleagues
• Department of NanoEngineering and Chemical Engineering Program, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
• Image reprinted with permission from the AAAS - the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Published in Science Robotics, June 2020