Dr. Veronika Magdanz, an assistant professor in systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo, is researching the potential of sperm-templated soft magnetic microrobots to treat cancer, infertility and more.
By uniting bovine sperm with microtubes, Magdanz found that the sperm could effectively move the microtubes around. This discovery laid the groundwork for the creation of IRONSperm.
IRONSperm may sound like a biological superhero, but it turns out the name is aptly descriptive. Since live bovine sperm can’t be injected into humans to deliver cargo such as cancer-fighting drugs, the microrobots are constructed using deactivated bovine sperm that are coated with magnetic nanoparticles.
The non-motile sperm cells serve as a flexible template and drug carrier that researchers control movement of using external magnetic fields. Since the IRONSperm are magnetized, they can also be seen on ultrasound.
Sometimes sperm aren’t involved at all. Magdanz is also studying the application of artificial microrobots made from magnetized gelatin-based flexible filaments to treat large kidney stones non-invasively.
“The idea would be to load them with drugs, inject them with a catheter into the bladder or in the kidney and then leave them there for a few days to help dissolve the kidney stone faster,” she says.
Go to Moving biomedical research forward with IRONSperm for the full story.