Biomedical engineer and Cyber Valley research group leader Dr. Tian Qiu from the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Stuttgart will receive one of the prestigious Starting Grants of the European Research Council (ERC) from January 2023. The funded project is called "VIBEBOT", which is developing microrobots that can move through biological tissue and thus enable minimally invasive medical interventions.
How could drugs be used in the body in a more targeted way in the future? Biomedicine could provide an answer. Dr. Tian Qiu is researching tiny robots that travel through the human body.
Dr. Tian Qiu's research on microrobots holds enormous potential for future minimally invasive medicine.
Tian Qiu and his team already succeeded in steering nanorobots through the dense tissue of an eyeball for minimally invasive drug delivery, which had never been achieved before.
In the "VIBEBOT" project, Qiu and his team are taking this approach further: They are going to build the first micro-sized robot that can actively propel and wirelessly sense in deep biological tissues. For the project, Qui was inspired by nature: "We know that worms, for example, can penetrate human skin to infect humans. Why can't we build a similar-sized robotic system that can penetrate soft tissue to treat disease?" Research on this holds enormous potential for future minimally invasive medicine, "such as targeted drug delivery for tumor therapy," Qiu said.
COMPAMED-tradefair.com; Source: Universität Stuttgart