See How Robots Deliver Medicine Inside the Heart

Johns Hopkins University engineers have created robots the size of a pencil tip intended to travel through the body to deliver medicine to infections inside a beating heart.

The bots, designed to replace risky open-heart surgery and ineffective IV-drug therapy to treat life-threatening heart infections, could also be used to less invasively and more precisely treat other hard-to-reach diseases including cancer.

The robots work in pairs. There’s one the team calls the needle module, which gently latches onto heart tissue right at the infected site. There it serves as a docking station, waiting right on the beating heart for the drug module. The drug module carries medicine to the docking station where it magnetically docks and slowly releases the antibiotics right where they’re most needed.

Both robots are magnetic and guided wirelessly by an external electromagnetic coil system, that works like an MRI machine.

“If everything works well, you go from four to six weeks of treatment to one day or less.” Says Anuruddha Bhattacharjee, the first author of the work that was recently published in Advanced Material Technologies.