Spiral-shaped robots that can travel through an eyeball to deliver medicine were created by a joint Chinese-German research team. The microbots were created using nanoscale 3D printing, a technique capable of producing items 200 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Using a slippery coating made from a magnetic material, robots are able to travel through the thick liquid that makes up most of the eye, called the vitreous humor. In a study, published in the scientific journal Science Advances, 10.000 of the little robots were injected into the eyes of dead pigs at a slaughterhouse. They were then checked using a magnetic field. The swarm reached the retina at the back of the eye in less than 30 minutes, which is 10 times faster than the eye drops. The researchers, led by the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Stuttgart, said the study gives them hope that "micro-vehicles" can be used to quickly and effectively treat eye diseases such as glaucoma. or diabetic macular edema. The German creators of the robots believe the devices could be the future of eye medicine because they could be used to deliver drugs with incredible precision. Currently, diseases that occur in the eyes are treated with drugs that are delivered through eye drops or injected through a needle. Its process is not accurate because the medicines spread slowly and randomly through the entire eye. Scientists, highlights Giovanni D'Agata, president of the "Rights Window", Now they will test the robots in the eyes of a living animal. If successful, tests on human patients can begin.
