Scientists create sugar pills to help robots navigate in body

Despite growing technology, we still don’t have a good way to get drug-delivering robots in our bodies for diagnosing diseases and delivering drug treatments where needed. But now, researchers believe that they might have accomplished that too with the help of sugar pills.

Researchers from University of California San Diego (UCSD) reported that using tiny micrometers to diagnose and treat disease in the human body can soon become a reality by the help of encapsulating them into pills.

The study published in ACS Nano stated that researchers have discovered ways to encapsulate micromotors into pills. The coating of the pills protect the devices as they navigate the digestive system before releasing the drug cargo. As Futurism reports, the micrometers are about the width of a human hair and are self-propelled microscopic robots that are made to made a host of biomedical tasks.

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Previously, the researchers used micromotors coated with an antibiotic for treating ulcers in laboratory mice. The team found that the technique generated better results than just taking the drugs by themselves. But, they noticed that body fluids like gastric acid and intestinal fluids caused some of the tiny bots to release the drugs before they reached the ulcers.

Also, when the drugs are taken orally in fluid, some of the micromotors can get caught up in the mice’s throat. In order to overcome these problems, researchers waned to create a way for guarding and carrying these devices into the stomach without compromising their efficiency.

The sugar pill was then created that comprised of a pair of sugars, lactose and maltose, and encapsulated tens of thousands of micromotors made up of magnesium/titanium dioxide core filled with a fluorescent dye cargo. The sugars were selected since they are easy to mold into tablet and can also disintegrate when required and are nontoxic.

When the pills were given to laboratory mice, they enhanced the discharge and retention of the micromotors in the stomach as compared to those encapsulated in silica-based tablets or in a liquid solution.

It was then concluded that encapsulating micromotors in normal pill form improves their ability to deliver medicines to specific targets without diminishing their mobility or performance, wrote Science Daily.