A medical tech company has developed remote-controlled drug delivery micro-bots that can travel to specific parts of the human body.

The magnetically guided Bionauts from Bionaut Labs are under 1 mm micro-robots that are capable of navigating through human tissue, for instance, to access hard-to-reach cancers in the human body.

Controlled via the robot’s tip and guided by magnetic fields outside of the body, a Bionaut enters the patient, navigates to its intended target, releases its drug payload and then turns around to leave the body.

Source: Jon McKee Photography

Unlike current linear interventions wherein surgical drills, needles and probes enter the body to deliver medication, the Bionaut can turn once inside the body — thereby removing the constraints of those linear interventions.

Going forward, the team is exploring the Bionauts as a treatment for delivering chemotherapies to gliomas of the brainstem, which are difficult-to-treat, aggressive tumors. So far, the Bionauts have only been trialed on large and small animals in the lab.