Skip to main content

Nemo-inspired drug-delivery robot is 100 times smaller than a grain of sand

Dory searches for answers in Finding Nemo.
What does medical drug delivery have to do with a popular underwater-themed Pixar movie? If you’re a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Harbin Institute of Technology, the answer is obvious: everything.

What Jinxing Li, Tianlong Li and other researchers have created is a tiny “nanofish” capable of carrying drugs to specific sites of the body, along with other applications.

And according to Li, watching Finding Nemo was one of the team’s main influences.

“We created a nanoscale robot which mimics the fish swimming [motion],” Li, a Ph.D. Student at UC San Diego, told Digital Trends. “The size of the nanorobot is even smaller than a red blood cell. We expect this nanofish robot would be used for precise medicine delivery, manipulation of single cells, or [performing] non-invasive surgery.”

Related: Smart contact lenses release drugs directly into your eye

The nanofish, which are 100 times smaller than a grain of sand, are created out of gold and nickel segments that are linked together using silver hinges. By applying an oscillating magnetic field to the microscopic robots, the magnetic nickel parts can be made to move from side to side, resulting in an undulating motion which drives them forward. Altering the strength and orientation of the magnetic field can change the speed and direction of the fish to generate precise movements.

Li said that the team has already created the nanofish robots and demonstrated that they can swim in blood. “The next step is to integrate more biological functions on the nanofish robot for biomedical purpose,” he continued.

Don’t get too excited about them being used in hospitals any time soon, though. Just like Nemo, they’ve got a long journey ahead of them. “To be honest, I have no idea [how long we’re talking about],” Li acknowledged. “I speculate, [at the] fastest speed, it may take 1-2 years for animal [testing], and overall [around] 5 years to get it working on human beings.”

It could be well worth the wait, though.

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Drone deliveries may consume 10 times as much energy as van deliveries in cities
army use lasers power drones drone getty images

Drone-based deliveries have been promised for years now, and are just now starting to (no pun intended) get off the ground. There are plenty of reasons to be excited at the prospect of flying robots bringing your latest online delivery, but one that is frequently mentioned is the idea that drones will remove a certain number of delivery vehicles from the road, leading to a positive environmental impact.

Not so fast, claims a recent study carried out by a researcher at Martin Luther Universitat in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Having run the numbers, Thomas Kirschstein, from MLU’s department of Production and Logistics, thinks drone deliveries could actually wind up consuming a whole lot more energy than alternative vehicular options, especially in dense urban areas. Kirschstein’s simulations suggest that drones could use around 10 times as much energy as electric vans, and significantly more than diesel vans (which use twice the energy of electric vans).

Read more
Inside the mind of an autonomous delivery robot
how starship robots navigate world 02 campus feat

In the summer of 2014, Ahti Heinla, one of the software engineers who helped develop Skype, started taking photos of his house.

There is nothing particularly unusual about this, of course. Only he kept on doing it. Month after month, as summer turned to fall and fall gave way to winter, Heinla went out to the same exact spot on the sidewalk and snapped new, seemingly identical pictures of his home. Was the man who had played a crucial role in building a multibillion dollar telecommunications app losing his mind? As it turned out, there was an entirely logical reason for Heinla’s actions -- although it might have nonetheless sounded a bit crazy to anyone who asked what he was doing. Ahti Heinla was helping future autonomous robots learn how to see.

Read more
This robot will change your tires in a fraction of the time a mechanic can
robotire robot changes tires

Everyone knows about self-driving cars that use cutting-edge machine intelligence to navigate. But robots might have another important role to play in future cars: Changing our tires. According to a recent report, a new Y Combinator startup called RoboTire, currently in semi-stealth mode, is building robots that can change car tires in a fraction of the time it currently takes human mechanics.

“We can do a set of four tires, put in to pull out, in 10 minutes,” RoboTire CEO Victor Darolfi told TechCrunch. “It normally takes about 60 minutes for a human operator to do a set of four. Some can go faster, but they really can’t do that eight hours a day.”

Read more