L.A. startup is building tiny injectable robots to attack tumors

I lost my sister to a glioma a few years back. I've always known that eventually better treatments would become available, but this is novel and not something I envisioned. I hope it works and saves children who have these brain tumors.

I recall seeing early trials on horse / pigs cadavers at a robotics conf. The robot is actuated / steered externally using a closed-loop MRI imager and magnetic field steering. So, the "robot" isn't exactly miniature if you count all that. Just the end effector, which is a small blob of metal and plasticy stuff. Still, really cool.

Robots seems like the wrong word, which seems a comfort in the this case. They mention that both moving it around, and activating the plunger is done via magnetic fields from outside the body. It actually sounds relatively "low tech", which perhaps means faster to approval.

I'm skeptical on a few points:

- Several previous attempts have been made to develop minimally invasive systems that rely on magnetic fields to move devices with several limitations. It turns out that this is considerably less reliable and precise than you might initially guess.

- The article doesn't state exactly how the microrobot is delivered. If it is into the vascular system there are several challenges with guiding a device through vessels at the scale that they're talking about. There are also significant challenges with moving such a device between different tissue or vascular compartments.

- The critical issue with treating gliomas is less the ability to get drugs into the tumor (this is achieve-able through various mechanisms which breack down the blood brain barrier) but more the fact that gliomas are infiltrative pathologies which can't be separated out from functional brain tissue.

I feel like the investors have probably been duped by nice sounding speculation from people with limited knowledge of neuropathology and endovascular therapy.

Clearly someone didn't read enough science fiction to know injectable robots ALWAYS ends up destroying the world.

I sure hope this works!

I've had this vision of a set of tiny robots that live in your stomach and perform some amount of pre-processing of the foods you eat.

They would do things like cut food into smaller pieces using small crab-like arms, digest and render inert sugars that are well beyond what your body needs and detect if you've eaten something that is rotten.

Interesting that the size of the devices is limited by imaging technology rather than the ability to fabricate smaller ones. I guess the trade-off is that imaging small things with X-rays requires more ionizing radiation.

Gosh this reminds me of Innerspace (1987) https://youtu.be/7kQDIosuZuo

If the robots are small enough isn’t this just going back to pharmacology? What’s the difference between a sufficiently tiny robot and a protein?

These are quite large though, why wouldn’t it work with say a long needle instead? I was imagining these robots to be small as cells!

How will these robots be ejected from the body (see note below) and what other application they may have? I look for most sinister applications possible, disguised as beneficial.

Asking for a friend, of course.

Note that human immune system cannot properly dispose particles above some diameter. This is the reason for silicosis and is a reason why tatoos do not disappear after some short time.

In my view, this "invention" is more harm than good.

Hey, the covid deniers want their conspiracy theory back :)

And the globalist conspiracy theory websites go crazy...

Robots really seems the wrong word here, after reading about the magnets. Especially with the whole anti-vaxxers "Bill Gates is injecting nanobots in my Covid vaccine" rubbish that's perpetually doing the rounds on social media of late.

Edit: it's very cool though!

Title is off, I couldn't figure out why they call these things "robots".

Isn't this that thing Bill Gates is doing? Doesn't it already come with the Covid vaccine?

What could go wrong