Invited Talk

Engineering Synthetic and Living Micro-and Nanoagents for Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy

ETH Zurich Responsive Biomedical Systems Laboratory Institute of Translational Medicine, Department of Health Sciences & Technology,, Vladimir-Prelog Weg 4, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland

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Engineering robots at the cellular scale could allow us to gain new insights into disease development and provide more targeted means for diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. Magnetic fields have proven to serve as safe strategy to wirelessly power magnetic microrobots for remote control in physiological environments. In this talk I will give an overview of three distinct examples of magnetic micro-and nanorobots for biomedical applications and describe their respective design and control schemes.

First, I will present a method for 3D spatiotemporal probing of tissue models from a single cell perspective using microrobots. We fabricated rod-shaped magnetic microrods and leveraged 3D magnetic field generation, physical modeling, and image analysis to reveal local shear moduli and remotely apply mechanical stimuli. Furthermore, we applied local mechanical stimuli to infer effects on metastasis in 3D tumor models.

The heterogenous mechanical landscape of a tumor’s extracellular matrix (ECM) is in part a result of increased local release of enzymes, in particular certain proteases, which degrades the ECM and is associated with tumor invasion. In a further example, I will describe nanorobots that are activated via magnetic fields and designed to report a tumor’s proteolytic activity as personalized diagnostic.

Last, I will show how magnetic fields can be leveraged to control swarms of living microrobots in context of bacterial cancer therapy. While living microbes have shown great potential as anti-cancer agents that can colonize tumors, deliver toxins, and provoke immune response, safety and controllability are still posing major challenges for clinical translation. Here I will show how a hybrid control scheme leverages innate tumor taxis and external magnetic fields to enhance local tumor accumulation in vivo, ultimately providing means to reduce the required dosage.