Synthetic and living micropropellers for convection-enhanced nanoparticle transport

• Main Authors: Schuerle, S (Author), Soleimany, Ava (Author), Yeh, Tiffany (Author), Anand, G. M. (Author), Häberli, M (Author), Fleming, Heather (Author), Mirkhani, N (Author), Qiu, F (Author), Hauert, S (Author), Wang, X (Author), Nelson, BJ (Author), Bhatia, Saurav (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor), Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2020-12-04T20:18:08Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 Nanoparticles (NPs) have emerged as an advantageous drug delivery platform for the treatment of various ailments including cancer and cardiovascular and inflammatory diseases. However, their efficacy in shuttling materials to diseased tissue is hampered by a number of physiological barriers. One hurdle is transport out of the blood vessels, compounded by difficulties in subsequent penetration into the target tissue. Here, we report the use of two distinct micropropellers powered by rotating magnetic fields to increase diffusion-limited NP transport by enhancing local fluid convection. In the first approach, we used a single synthetic magnetic microrobot called an artificial bacterial flagellum(ABF), and in the second approach,we used swarms of magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) to create a directable "living ferrofluid" by exploiting ferrohydrodynamics. Both approaches enhance NP transport in a microfluidicmodel of blood extravasation and tissue penetration that consists of microchannels bordered by a collagen matrix.