Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have helped an international team create nanoscale robots which could be used to manage bleeds in the brain.

The development of the tiny robot armies could help enable precise, relatively low-risk treatment of brain aneurysm—a condition which causes around 500,000 deaths globally each year.

The team engineered magnetic nanorobots, which are about a twentieth the size of a human red blood cell, with blood-clotting drugs encased in a protective coating that’s designed to melt at precise temperatures.

In lab tests, several hundred billion of the bots were injected into an artery and then remotely guided as a swarm, using magnets and medical imaging to the site of the aneurysm.

Magnetic sources outside the body then cause the robots to cluster together inside the aneurysm and be heated to their melting point, releasing a naturally occurring blood-clotting protein which blocks the aneurysm to prevent or stem bleeding into the brain.

The international team, co-led by clinicians from Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China, successfully tested their devices in model aneurysms in the lab and in a small number of rabbits.

The team said that nanorobots show potential for transporting and releasing drug molecules to precise locations in the body without risk of leaking into the bloodstream—a key test of the technology’s safety and efficacy.

The method also avoids the need for doctors to manually shape a microcatheter to navigate a complex network of small blood vessels in the brain to reach the aneurysm – a painstaking task which may take hours during surgery, researchers explained.

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“Nanorobots are set to open new frontiers in medicine – potentially allowing us to carry out surgical repairs with fewer risks than conventional treatments and target drugs with pinpoint accuracy in hard-to-reach parts of the body,” commented Dr Qi Zhou of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, who co-led the study.

“Our study is an important step towards bringing these technologies closer to treating critical medical conditions in a clinical setting.”

The team behind the study, which has been published in the nanoscience academic journal Small, have also developed nanorobots to remove blood clots, which show potential in treating stroke.