Precise Control of Magnetized Macrophage Cell Robot for Targeted Drug Delivery

Abstract

Micro-nano-robots are considered to be a promising platform for drug delivery in biological organisms, but there are still urgent technical problems in biocompatibility and degradability of 3D-printed-based micro-robots that need to be solved. Therefore, in this paper, we design a magnetized bio-hybrid robot, which uses mouse macrophages as carriers, and allowed it to swallow Fe <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> O <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</inf> particles with a diameter of 10 nm. The robot takes advantage of macrophage’s natural biocompatibility and targeting characteristics to reach and function in complex environments such as: eye, knee, tumor, etc., and finally being able to be actively metabolized by the organism. More importantly, the cell robot can move precisely along a preplanned path under the control of a three-dimensional magnetic control system built in this study, and be delivered accurately to the vicinity of cancer cells in vitro environment. In future work, cellular robots could be allowed to carry anti-cancer drugs and release them in a targeted manner at the lesion. These microrobots have shown great potential for tumor reginal targeted drug delivery.