Description du projet
Des micro/nanorobots pour des applications médicales
Les micro/nanorobots représentent un immense potentiel pour la médecine, notamment l’administration ciblée de médicaments, la microchirurgie de précision et le diagnostic. Le succès de l’introduction des micro/nanorobots médicaux repose sur le développement de mécanismes de propulsion efficaces et sûrs pour la navigation dans le sang. L’objectif de cette proposition financée par l’UE consiste à développer de nouveaux systèmes micro/nanorobotiques sans fil utilisant des modalités d’actionnement acoustiques et magnétiques. La recherche portera sur les aspects fondamentaux de l’application des micro/nanorobots dans des modèles animaux, et les résultats seront testés dans des modèles de maladies microfluidiques en 3D et des poissons zèbres.
Objectif
Micro/nanorobots can transform many aspects of medicine by enabling tasks, such as delivering drugs or genes precisely to targeted areas, transducing force on individual cells or tissues, performing biopsies, and facilitating non-invasive surgeries. Numerous propulsion mechanisms have been developed, but their low propulsion speed, lack of biocompatibility, and poor navigation capabilities have limited their use. The objective of this proposal is to develop wireless micro/nanorobots using acoustic and magnetic actuation modalities that will be used to navigate in microfluidics and zebrafish disease models to help better understand and treat diseases. The combination of ultrasound and magnetic fields is capable of overcoming the limitations encountered using a single actuation technique, and both are used extensively in clinical diagnostics and therapeutics. This proposal is divided into three research areas. 1) To date, no systematic studies have been conducted utilizing micro/nanorobotics on living animals. The research will address many of the fundamental challenges of using micro/nanorobots in living animals, followed by testing in microfluidics, 3D arbitrarily-shaped fluidic devices, and the vasculature of zebrafish embryos. Propulsion will be studied in the direction of and against blood flow, a 3D propulsion will be developed, and a swarm of nanorobots will be studied. 2) A platform will be developed that involves the trapping and manipulation of nanorobots in an animal model, such as zebrafish embryos. 3) We will develop an active drug delivery platform combined with other methods to study numerous disease models using the models based on live zebrafish embryos. We believe the results of the proposed research will have a significant impact in the field.
Champ scientifique
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Programme(s)
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Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
8092 Zuerich
Suisse