Microrobotics technology to help transform cancer treatments of the future

Cancer treatments and other delicate medical procedures could one day be carried out using tiny microrobots guided precisely inside the body after scientists developed a new magnetic tool to control them.

The new tool, called the Tuneable Magnetic End Effector (TME), was developed by the University of Essex's Robotics for Under Millimetre Innovation (RUMI) Lab to generate magnetic fields that can be switched, shaped and redirected with high precision.

It opens the door for a new age of targeted and minimally invasive healthcare, which could radically change the way medical treatments and surgeries are carried out.

This includes using the magnetic micro-robots to deliver therapies directly to diseased and hard-to-reach cancer tissues, improving treatment precision, reducing damage to healthy tissue and limiting the side effects associated with conventional therapies like chemotherapy.

Head of the RUMI Lab, Dr Ali Hoshiar, said: "Magnetic microrobotics offer a promising route toward more precise and less invasive medicine.

"Our system provides a new way to control miniature magnetic devices with greater flexibility, allowing us to manipulate individual tools, soft robotic structures and even particle swarms within the same platform.

"In the long term, this could support targeted therapies for diseases such as cancer and enable new forms of minimally invasive intervention."

Mounted on robotic arms and combined with AI-based control models, the TME can guide miniature medical devices, soft robotic tools and magnetic particle swarms in a controlled way across an area.

This will also allow clinicians to one day be able to use wirelessly controlled miniature devices to perform operations and delicate medical procedures.

Outlined in the journal, Nature Communications Eng, the TME system can reliably switch its magnetic field on and off, with real experiments matching computer simulations.

Researchers tested it by guiding small magnetic objects through branching paths, shaping soft magnetic robots, and controlling groups of tiny magnetic particles.

By using two TMEs together, they were also able to create separate areas with different magnetic control in the same space, making the system more flexible.

Unlike most systems that need constant electrical power, the TME uses permanent magnets that can be moved to change the magnetic field.

This makes it smaller, more efficient, and easier to control, which is useful for sensitive medical uses.

The team hopes to keep developing and testing this technology in more realistic medical settings, with the long-term aim of improving magnetic control for future microrobots used in healthcare.