The world of the insanely small is arriving. Practical applications may not even be
obvious yet, but this is one of those moments in which you go build it and
people will come.
Right now we have a device able to pass along the large
arteries. What it might do remains to be
defined.
At least access and retrieval can all be worked out.
Blood
device
STANFORD (CBS13) - In the
1966 film “Fantastic Voyage,” a submarine, full of scientists, is shrunk to
microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a seriously wounded
diplomat.
Forty-six years later, the
idea sounds less far fetched. In a Stanford lab, engineers are perfecting their
fantastic voyage.
“And then, we can make it
smaller,” said electrical engineer Professor Ada Poon, Ph.D.
Poon says smaller is the name
of the game.
“We have been in this project
for more than four years. So we encounter a lot of obstacles along the way and
then we solve them one by one, said Poon.
Instead of a battery, which
takes up lots of space, the device that will be used for travel is powered
wirelessly with electromagnetic radio waves.
“The prototype we built is 3mm
by 4mm. You can see here that we have a 2mm by 2mm receiving antennae,” said
Dan Pivonka, PhD.
The result is a new class of
medical devices that are so small they can travel through the bloodstream.
“Right now we could go to the
arteries. The midsize could go through the arteries, but we want it to even go
through some smaller bloodstreams,” said Poon.
These tiny devices may one day
change how we perform diagnostic tests, deliver medications, and even do
surgical procedures.
“We are pretty excited about
it, but this is only the first step. We still have a long way to go in order to
realize this fantastic voyage,” said Poon.
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