In the Asimov novel, the focus is on miniaturizing technology to send a submarine and human crew into the bloodstream and across the brain barrier to save the mind and life of an important scientist. That’s not the case here. No humans are being miniaturized.

Developed by Bionaut Labs with headquarters in Los Angeles, and research and development facilities in Israel and at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, a Bionaut is a remote-controlled microbot that comes in different designs to deliver biologics, nucleic acids, and small molecule therapies th the brain and central nervous system where traditional treatments have largely been unsuccessful or highly risky.

Bionauts are individually constructed with different form factors. No more than a millimeter in size, they come with a cargo compartment and contain moving parts that respond to a remote magnetic controller used to guide them to a targeted area in the brain or brain stem to deliver therapeutic payloads.

In a March 3, 2021 press release, Dr. Santosh Kesari, Chair of the Department of Translational Neurosciences and Director of Neuro-Oncology at St. John’s Cancer Institute, Santa Monica, California, is quoted stating, “The brain is uniquely designed to protect itself from external factors. This makes medical intervention in the central nervous system extremely challenging. The Bionaut technology opens the door to precise treatment for a wide variety of severe brain disorders.” 

For Brainstem glioma, a tumor that impacts children and young adults, today’s cure rates are low. But with the Bionaut in recent laboratory mouse tests with human glioma tumors, glioma treatment and elimination have been successful. Clinical human trials should follow in 2023.

What’s in Bionauts future? Delivery of new therapeutic capabilities such as antisense, siRNA, gene therapy, CRISPR-Cas9, and oncolytic viruses. With precision delivery, the Bionaut should make it possible to tackle Parkinson’s, Huntington’s Disease, Hydrocephalus Stroke, Focal Epilepsy, and more entering through the brain stem or through direct brain insertion.

As mentioned before, Bionauts come in a wide range of configurations, sizes, payloads, shapes, and topologies based on the desired task, disease and site location. The ability to construct different versions provides infinite flexibility and offers safer alternatives for treating specific brain and central nervous system diseases. The potential is to be able to deliver continuous therapeutics and disease monitoring using customized delivery to do a wide range of medical interventions including brain stimulation, microsurgery, and ablation.

The company was estalbished in 2016 by founders Aviad Maizels and Michael Shpigelmacher. They were motivated to find a means to do precision medicine using microbots, a burgeoning field of discovery and invention. Working with the Max Planck Institute, and with medical robot pioneers in Israel, Bionaut is an expression of two different evolutionary steps in medicine: using micro-robotics inside us to diagnose and treat diseases, and personalized medical therapies where drug delivery isn’t done through whole-body diffusion with all the potential consequences of side effects.

Both of these medical technology trends should lead to far better outcomes for patients and in the case of Bionaut, alleviate suffering from those with brain and central nervous system diseases, let’s hope, in the very near future.

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What is a microbot?

A very small robot that can be directed by operators through the use of electromagnetic fields. The size of these devices can be measured from as small as a few nanometers to several millimeters. Microbots can work alone or in groups exhibiting swarm behavior. In a swarm they communicate with each other and coordinate actions. It is all very sci-fi. Remember Michael Crichton’s “Prey?” The book told the story about  microbots escaping from a laboratory and becoming a self-sustaining, self-reproducing, intelligence. You would think the story would have scared researchers from even considering developing the real thing.

But that hasn’t happened because microbots even in swarms are a useful technological innovation. It is their tininess that makes them so powerful. Microbots contain no on board means of locomotion, which begs the question, just how did Crichton’s microbots manage once outside the confines of their laboratory?

In the real world of microbots the technology responds to external magnetic fields. But unless an application requires all microbots to act the same, it would seem the devices would have little real world application. The trick, therefore, is to make each microbot work individually. That requires external magnetic controllers sensitive enough to manipulate each individual precisely without affecting others in the immediate surroundings.

That’s what engineers at Purdue University set out to do. They built a magnetic controller that can operate individual microbots within a group. They did this by creating tiny coils that alternate attractive and repulsive forces. This allowed them to manipulate individual 2 millimeter-sized microbots within a group. Now the team is working on the next generation of even smaller microbots measuing 250 micrometers (0.25 millimeters) in diamter. Their current success has been described in a paper appearing in this month’s issue of the journal Micromachines.

SRI International, whose Motobot (the motorcycle riding robot featured at this January’s Consumer Electronics Show) excited the crowd, has also been experimenting with magnetically-activated microbots. In a posted YouTube video SRI’s version of microbots can be seen crawling at real-time speeds of 35 centimeters per second. In another segment you watch microbots doing a variety of assembly tasks in a coordinated process. SRI sees these types of microbots as integral to manufacturing, building integrated circuits and smart structures.

But that’s not all, biomedical engineers are exploring how to manipulate robot molecules and use them as surgical instruments. They call their invention, nanorobots, tiny charged particles that work in concert within blood vessels. Applications include unblocking occluded arteries.

At Drexel University, MinJun Kim, is working with an international team from the United States, Switzerland and South Korea to perfect nanobots controlled by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. After all an MRI uses magnets to create images. This new MRI application turns the machines into command and control centers capable of steering molecule-sized nanobots through the bloodstream while watching them do their work.

Right now the nanobots are only being tested in animal studies. After these molecular machines blast through a clog in an artery they will swim away and biodegrade. If all goes well human clinical trials are expected to start in 2019.

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