An international team of scientists has developed a drug delivery system that could one day treat human brain aneurysms in a way without the need for traditional surgery.

The team said it built billions of tiny simple magnetic nanorobots - each 300nm in diameter, or about a twentieth the width of a human red blood cell - that contain clotting medications. After injecting several hundred billion of these into a rabbit's artery, the scientists used magnets and medical imaging technology to cause the bots to cluster together inside an aneurysm, according to the boffins.

The bots were then heated to their melting point. The process released a naturally occurring blood-clotting protein to prevent or stop the aneurysm bleeding into the brain, the researchers noted.

"Nanorobots are set to open new frontiers in medicine - potentially allowing us to carry out surgical repairs with fewer risks than conventional treatments and target drugs with pinpoint accuracy in hard-to-reach parts of the body," argued Dr Qi Zhou, research associate at the University of Edinburgh's School of Engineering, who co-led the study.

"Our study is an important step towards bringing these technologies closer to treating critical medical conditions in a clinical setting."

Aneurysms occur when a blood vessel bulges, which could eventually rupture and cause internal bleeding. While most common in the brain, if and when they occur, they can grow in other parts of the body. These conditions are extremely tricky to treat, typically involving inserting a microcatheter into the damaged blood vessel, which is both invasive and takes hours of surgery, and may not be possible with larger aneurysms.

There are about 30,000 ruptured brain aneurysms in the US each year and these are fatal in about half of all cases. Of those that survive, about two-thirds will suffer some permanent neurological deficit, according to Brain Aneurysm Foundation.

In a paper published in Small journal, the Edinburgh team, co-led by doctors from Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital, successfully used the technique on "a small number of rabbits," and confirmed the results two weeks later.

The team also suggests that this technique could be used not only for aneurysms, but potentially for other medical procedures where precise drug delivery is required, such as breaking down blood clots that can lead to strokes.

The next stage will be developing the technology for human trials, but much more work is needed before the technology can be safely deployed. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/09/07/nanobots_brain_aneurysms/