Navigating Into The Body
Living Bacteria as a Drug Delivery System
Micro- and nano-scale engineering is an emerging field with the potential to tackle some of today’s most crucial challenges in medicine. In particular, recent research showed how micro-nano-scale medicine could play a game-changing role in cancer diagnostics and treatment.
Let us imagine that magnetic bacteria flowing through the human body until they reach a tumor. What if such type of living bacteria could serve as a drug delivery system to locally treat cancer while being externally controlled? Is it fiction? Not really.
Together with the Responsive Biomedical Systems Laboratory (RBSL) at ETH Zürich, directed by the Professor Simone Schürle-Finke, I developed a method to build a three-dimensional world to illustrate this complex scientific process. The result shows how magnetotactic bacteria can navigate into the body and go out through blood vessels into the tumor by the use of external magnetic fields. The visualization of this process aims at communicating the research in an effective way and aiding future public acceptance for this new fascinating method.
