Good news! Cancer is history (soon)!
"Microrobots are a promising avenue for delivering medicines in the body ... A similarly tiny workhorse does a better job: our body’s own cells.
Researchers aimed to design a therapeutic that merged the drug delivery abilities of microrobots with the biological hunting abilities of natural cells.
They genetically engineered living human embryonic kidney cells to express a special molecule called tumor necrosis factor–related apoptosis-inducing ligand, or TRAIL.
When TRAIL binds to so-called “death receptors” in cancer cells, it sparks a series of signals that cause the cell to undergo programmed death.
Healthy cells, which have comparatively lower levels of death receptors, get left unharmed.
The researchers then outfitted the TRAIL-modified cells with tiny magnetic beads that enabled the team to magnetically navigate the cells to their targets. Across all kinds of cancer cells the team tested, including colon, brain, kidney, and ovarian cancer cells, the cell-based bot significantly harmed cancerous cells while leaving normal cells alive. ..."
"... These microrobots are built from living human kidney cells and also human fibroblasts that are genetically engineered to produce:
- TRAIL (tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand)–a protein that selectively induces cancer cell death.
- GFP (green fluorescent protein)–a fluorescent marker used to visualize and track microrobots during navigation.
The engineered human cells are then attached to magnetic particles—tiny silica beads partially coated with a thin magnetic FePt layer. This design allows the microrobots to be remotely guided using magnetic fields.
After this fabrication process, the human cell-based microrobots can be magnetically controlled and directed toward target locations, where they release TRAIL as a therapeutic agent. Under external magnetic fields, they can be precisely guided to tumor sites, where they accumulate and act locally. ..."
From the abstract:
"Medical microrobots have strong potential for targeted therapeutic delivery; however, current systems achieve only physical targeting, and once at the target site, they are unable to distinguish healthy cells from cancerous ones because of the lack of biological selectivity.
Here, we present a biohybrid microrobot system that combines magnetic targeting with biological selectivity. The microrobots are derived from human embryonic kidney cells genetically engineered to produce tumor necrosis factor–related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL), a molecule that induces cancer cell death in multiple tumor types without damaging healthy cells.
Engineered cells are then conjugated to biocompatible magnetic Janus particles—silica beads half-coated with FePt nanofilms—to enable external magnetic control. With magnetic fields, the microrobots accumulate around the tumor spheroids and continuously release TRAIL for several days, leading to selective cancer cell death while avoiding damage to healthy cells.
This study combines microrobotics with genetically engineered cell therapies to achieve a targeted, prolonged, and cancer-selective therapeutic delivery."
Figure 1. Fabrication of human cell-based microrobots.
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