Exploited in The New Heroesa surprisingly underrated Disney, the idea of using microrobots to treat certain health conditions is far from just a cartoon fantasy. As The Debrief reports, scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich (Switzerland) have indeed announced a series of successful experiments involving the repair of injured spinal cords in zebrafish and mice after injection of tiny magnetically controlled robots.
These microrobots contain pluripotent stem cells, that is to say capable of “transforming” into any cell in our body and having natural regenerative properties. The use of these cells had initially generated controversy due to the need to extract neonatal stem cells; Since then, scientists have fortunately learned to convert ordinary stem cells into pluripotent stem cells, without needing to go and harvest babies.
Very promising results
In a press release summarizing their work, the ETH team explains that zebrafish and mice injected with the microrobots showed improved movement and normalized exploratory behavior just days after treatment. Although initial studies have been limited to laboratory animals, the team hopes that its magnetically controlled microrobots for precise delivery of pluripotent stem cells will eventually be able to be used in humans with spinal cord injuries.
Unlike some cells in the human body, nerve cells in the spinal cord rarely regenerate spontaneously. In the event of a spinal cord injury, scarring can further reduce the ability of nerve fibers to regrow, thus hindering the healing journeys of people with spinal cord injuries, who are regularly promised miracle breakthroughs.
The new approach combines therapeutic stem cells with magnetoelectric nanoparticles and uses magnetic fields to guide them to the “precise site of the lesion” And “stimulate stem cells to accelerate repair”. The ETH team injected millions of these new neural robots into the injured spinal cords of zebrafish larvae, which “presented almost normal swimming and exploratory behavior” after three days. In mice, similar test results have been described as “very promising”.
“After twenty-eight days, the nerve cells of the animals had reconnected at the level of the lesion,” explain the researchers, who add that “microrobotic guidance makes treatment more precise and less invasive”. But what happens to the microrobots once their mission is accomplished? They “almost dissolve” in tissues, respond the scientists, while adding that “additional studies will be necessary to determine if and how these particles are degraded or eliminated in the long term”.
