Tag Archives: nanorobotic agents

Canada’s Nanorobotics Laboratory unveils its ‘medical interventional infrastructure’

Located at the Polytechnique Montréal (Canada), the Nanorobotics Laboratory has built a one-of-a-kind ‘medical interventional infrastructure’, the result of a $4.6M investment from various levels of government and from private enterprise.

Before getting to the news release, here’s a video featuring Prof. Sylvain Martel who discusses his work by referencing the movie, Fantastic Voyage. There are subtitles for those whose French fails them,

From an Aug. 24, 2016 Polytechnique Montréal news release (also on EurekAlert),

Fifty years to the day after the film Fantastic Voyage was first shown in theatres, the Polytechnique Montréal Nanorobotics Laboratory is unveiling a unique medical interventional infrastructure devoted to the fight against cancer. The outcome of 15 years of research conducted by Professor Sylvain Martel and his team, it enables microscopic nanorobotic agents to be guided through the vascular systems of living bodies, delivering drugs to targeted areas.

An action-packed 100,000-kilometre journey in the human body

Fantastic Voyage recounted the adventure of a team of researchers shrunk to microscopic size who, aboard a miniature submarine, travelled into a patient’s body to conduct a medical operation in a surgically inoperable area. This science fiction classic has now been eclipsed by procedures and protocols developed by Professor Martel’s multidisciplinary team comprising engineers, scientists and experts from several medical specialties working together on these projects that herald the future of medicine.

“Our work represents a new vision of cancer treatments, with our goal being to develop the most effective transportation systems for the delivery of therapeutic agents right to tumour cells, to areas unreachable by conventional treatments,” says Professor Martel, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Medical Nanorobotics and Director of the Polytechnique Montréal Nanorobotics Laboratory.

Conveying nanorobotic agents into the bloodstream to reach the targeted area right up to the tiniest capillaries without getting lost in this network stretching about 100,000 kilometres—two-and-a-half times the Earth’s circumference—is a scenario that has been turned into reality. This is an adventure-filled journey for these microscopic vehicles that must confront the powerful onslaught of arterial blood flow, the mazes of the vascular network and the narrowness of the capillaries—just like the film’s heroes!

“Doctors” invisible to the naked eye

To conduct this fantastic voyage, Professor Martel’s team is developing various procedures, often playing a pioneering role. These include navigating carriers just a fraction of the thickness of a hair through the arteries using a clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) platform, the first in the world to achieve this in a living organism, in 2006. This exploit was followed in 2011 by the guidance of drug-loaded micro-transporters into the liver of a rabbit.

Limits to the miniaturization of artificial nanorobots prevent them from penetrating the smallest blood vessels, however. For this, Professor Martel plans to have them play the role of Trojan horses, enclosing an “army” of special bacteria loaded with drugs that they will release at the edges of these small vessels.

Able to follow paths smaller than a red blood cell, these self-propelled bacteria move at high speed (200 microns per second, or 200 times their size per second). Once they are inside a tumour, they are able to naturally detect hypoxic (oxygen-starved) zones, which are the most active zones and the hardest to treat by conventional means, including radiotherapy, and then deliver the drug.

Professor Martel’s team has succeeded in using this procedure to administer therapeutic agents in colorectal tumours in mice, guiding them through a magnetic field. This has just been the subject of an article in the renowned journal Nature Nanotechnology, titled Magneto-gerotactic Bacteria Deliver Drug-containing Nanoliposomes to Tumour Hypoxic Regions. “This advanced procedure, which provides optimal targeting of a tumour while preserving surrounding healthy organs and tissue, unlike current chemotherapy or radiotherapy, heralds a new era in cancer treatment,” says Dr. Gerald Batist, Director of the McGill Centre for Translational Research in Cancer, based at the Jewish General Hospital, which is collaborating on the project.

Professor Martel’s projects also focus on the inaccessibility of certain parts of the body, such as the brain, to transporting agents. In 2015, his team also stood out by successfully opening a rat’s blood-brain barrier, temporarily and without damage, providing access to targeted areas of the brain. This feat was achieved through a slight rise in temperature caused by exposing nanoparticles to a radiofrequency field.

“At present, 98% of drug molecules cross the blood-brain barrier only with great difficulty,” notes Dr. Anne-Sophie Carret, a specialist in hematology-oncology at Montréal’s Centre hospitalier universitaire Sainte-Justine and one of the doctors collaborating on the project. “This means surgery is often the only way to treat some patients who have serious brain diseases. But certain tumours are inoperable because of their location. Radiation therapy, for its part, is not without medium- and long-term risk for the brain. This work therefore offers real hope to patients suffering from a brain tumour.”

Here’s who invested, how much they invested, and what the Nanorobotics Laboratory got for its money,

This new investment in the Nanorobotics Laboratory represents $4.6 million in infrastructure, with contributions of $1.85 million each from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and the Government of Québec. Companies including Siemens Canada and Mécanik have also made strategic contributions to the project. This laboratory now combines platforms to help develop medical protocols for transferring the procedures developed by Professor Martel to a
clinical setting.

The laboratory contains the following equipment:

  • a clinical MRI platform to navigate microscopic carriers directly into specific areas in the vascular system and for 3D visualization of these carriers in the body;
  • a specially-developed platform that generates the required magnetic field sequences to guide special bacteria loaded with therapeutic agents into tumours;
  • a robotic station (consisting of a robotized bed) for moving a patient from one platform to another;
  • a hyperthermia platform for temporary opening of the blood-brain barrier;
  • a mobile X-ray system;
  • a facility to increase the production of these cancer-fighting bacteria.

Sylvain Martel’s most recent work with nanorobotic agents (as cited in the news release) was featured here in an Aug. 16, 2016 post.

Very precise nanorobots redefine the administration of anti-cancer drugs

A very exuberant announcement has been made about cancer drug delivery by precise nanorobots, which have been tested in mice, in an Aug. 15, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily,

Researchers from Polytechnique Montréal, Université de Montréal and McGill University have just achieved a spectacular breakthrough in cancer research. They have developed new nanorobotic agents capable of navigating through the bloodstream to administer a drug with precision by specifically targeting the active cancerous cells of tumours. This way of injecting medication ensures the optimal targeting of a tumour and avoids jeopardizing the integrity of organs and surrounding healthy tissues. As a result, the drug dosage that is highly toxic for the human organism could be significantly reduced.

This scientific breakthrough has just been published in the prestigious journal Nature Nanotechnology in an article titled “Magneto-aerotactic bacteria deliver drug-containing nanoliposomes to tumour hypoxic regions.” The article notes the results of the research done on mice, which were successfully administered nanorobotic agents into colorectal tumours.

An Aug. 15, 2016 Polytechnique Montréal news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the work and the nanorobots or nanorobotic agents (bacteria) in more detail,

“These legions of nanorobotic agents were actually composed of more than 100 million flagellated bacteria – and therefore self-propelled – and loaded with drugs that moved by taking the most direct path between the drug’s injection point and the area of the body to cure,” explains Professor Sylvain Martel, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Medical Nanorobotics and Director of the Polytechnique Montréal Nanorobotics Laboratory, who heads the research team’s work. “The drug’s propelling force was enough to travel efficiently and enter deep inside the tumours.”

When they enter a tumour, the nanorobotic agents can detect in a wholly autonomous fashion the oxygen-depleted tumour areas, known as hypoxic zones, and deliver the drug to them. This hypoxic zone is created by the substantial consumption of oxygen by rapidly proliferative tumour cells. Hypoxic zones are known to be resistant to most therapies, including radiotherapy.

But gaining access to tumours by taking paths as minute as a red blood cell and crossing complex physiological micro-environments does not come without challenges. So Professor Martel and his team used nanotechnology to do it.

Bacteria with compass

To move around, bacteria used by Professor Martel’s team rely on two natural systems. A kind of compass created by the synthesis of a chain of magnetic nanoparticles allows them to move in the direction of a magnetic field, while a sensor measuring oxygen concentration enables them to reach and remain in the tumour’s active regions. By harnessing these two transportation systems and by exposing the bacteria to a computer-controlled magnetic field, researchers showed that these bacteria could perfectly replicate artificial nanorobots of the future designed for this kind of task.

“This innovative use of nanotransporters will have an impact not only on creating more advanced engineering concepts and original intervention methods, but it also throws the door wide open to the synthesis of new vehicles for therapeutic, imaging and diagnostic agents,” Professor Martel adds. “Chemotherapy, which is so toxic for the entire human body, could make use of these natural nanorobots to move drugs directly to the targeted area, eliminating the harmful side effects while also boosting its therapeutic effectiveness.”

This news contrasts somewhat with research at the University of Toronto (my April 27, 2016 posting) investigating how many drug-carrying nanoparticles find the cancer tumours they are intended for. The answer was that less than 1% make their way to the tumour and the conclusion those scientists reached was that we don’t know enough about how materials are delivered to the cells. My question, are the bacteria/nanorobots better at finding the tumours/cells? It’s not clear from the news release.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Magneto-aerotactic bacteria deliver drug-containing nanoliposomes to tumour hypoxic regions by Ouajdi Felfoul, Mahmood Mohammadi, Samira Taherkhani, Dominic de Lanauze, Yong Zhong Xu, Dumitru Loghin, Sherief Essa, Sylwia Jancik, Daniel Houle, Michel Lafleur, Louis Gaboury, Maryam Tabrizian, Neila Kaou, Michael Atkin, Té Vuong, Gerald Batist, Nicole Beauchemin, Danuta Radzioch, & Sylvain Martel. Nature Nanotechnology (2016)  doi:10.1038/nnano.2016.137 Published online 15 August 2016

This paper is behind a paywall.