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Engineers at the University of Toronto have built a set of magnetic tweezers able to position a pearl at the nanoscale inside human cells in three dimensions with unprecedented accuracy. Nano-robots have been used to study the properties of cancer and could indicate the way forward to improve diagnosis and treatment.
For two decades, Professor Yu Sun and his team built robots that manipulate individual cells. Their inventions make it possible to manipulate and measure individual cells. their latest study pushes technology further, as published in Science Robotics.
A robotic system has been created capable of manipulating sub-cellular structures in electron microscopes, requiring cell freeze-drying and slicing. to probe living cells, others have used techniques such as laser or acoustics. Optical tweezers / lasers to probe cells are a popular approach.
The team designed a system that uses 6 magnetic coils placed in different planes around the microscope slide seeded with living cancer cells; a magnetic iron bead of about 700 nanometers in diameter is placed on the coverslip where the cancer cells take it easily inside their membranes. Once inside, the team controls their position using real-time feedback from confocal microscopy; computer-controlled algorithms are used to vary the electric current through each of the coils, shaping the magnetic field in the dimension and causing the bead to any desired position in the cell.
Cell nucleus studies previously required extraction from cells; the team can measure cell nuclei in intact cells without it being necessary to separate the cell membrane or cytoskeleton; could show that the nucleus was not equally rigid in all directions; were able to measure how much he became stiffer after being pushed several times; and determine which cellular protein can play a role in controlling this response.
According to the team, such knowledge could pave the way for new methods of cancer diagnosis and research could go even further. "Whole swarms of nano-bots could be used to starve a tumor by blocking the blood vessels in the tumor, or directly to destroy it through mechanical ablation; this could offer a method to treat cancers resistant to various therapies "
Although it is still far from clinical deployment, it is an exciting job, with many orientations and implications. The team is doing their first experiments on animals, it is not yet in the fantastic journey, but it has reached unprecedented accuracy in terms of position control and the strength needed to achieve it.
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