Thank you for your question!

To be able to reach that point, where we can safely administer medical micro- and nanorobots to human bodies to carry out various medical tasks, some challenges remain to be tackled.

Firstly, the micro- or nanorobot should be safe for injection – meaning it should be biocompatible for its application, and should still be actively controllable to target specific regions. This requires extensive research on material development, safety tests, and wireless control mechanisms (such as magnetic fields, light, acoustics, etc.). Currently, hundreds of different medical micro and nanorobots are tested on Petri dishes and animal models, and many promising candidates could perhaps one day turn into clinical success.

However, that is not the end of it. Once your tiny robot is good to go, then we need real-time medical imaging techniques to be able to precisely detect and visualize these robots inside the body. Currently, many imaging systems are developed to increase the resolution and overcome the imaging limits such as our tissue penetration depth. Another important aspect that is commonly overlooked is the removal or elimination of the biohybrid microrobots after the treatment. Approaches regarding retrieval of the microrobots should be investigated as well. Additionally, active control mechanisms should be scaled up for human use, since currently reported setups are mostly designed for proof-of-the-concept studies and small animals.

We need many more in vivo and then pre-clinical studies that rigorously investigate the feasibility of these tiny robots. Therefore this is currently not a “ready-to-use” technology that our society can benefit from when it comes to treating patients, however, it holds great promise, and considering the exponential increase in the research of nano- and microrobots to overcome mentioned challenges, it is not far-fetched to imagine the use of medical robots in clinics in the future.

All the best,
/birgül