PHARMACEUTICALS
A "bionaut" is shown next to a penny for scale.
Image courtesy of Bionaut Labs
How Bionaut Labs aims to tackle brain tumors with microrobots Tiny robots could ferry drugs to the brain to treat conditions ranging from Parkinson’s to cancer. Brian Buntz | Pharma Editor |
T
he roboticist Michael Shpigelmacher was one of the founders of PrimeSense, a robotic 3-D vision technology company Apple acquired in 2013. PrimeSense created technology empowering the Microsoft Xbox Kinect and the iPhone’s Face ID feature, allowing users to use facial recognition to unlock their phones. Now Shpigelmacher has set his sights on drug delivery with Bionaut Labs, a startup aiming to use tiny robots for precision drug dosing. Bionaut recently won $20 million in venture capital funding.
There was the aha moment.
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Medical Design & Outsourcing
5 • 2021
Microrobots for the central nervous system Bionaut Labs traces its history back to an observation Shpigelmacher made while working for a large consulting firm after the sale of
PrimeSense. It seemed strange that many drugs focused on a small region of the body, but the drug delivery mechanism relied on systemic dosing. “There was the aha moment,” he recalled. He mulled whether he could “build something for precise anatomical targeting.” Shpigelmacher reached out to a business partner, Aviad Maizels, with the idea to explore the intersection between miniature robotics and medicine. They ended up discovering and licensing research from the Max Planck Institute that uses microrobots for drug delivery. The concept harkens back to the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, in which a miniaturized submarine travels in the body of an injured scientist to repair brain damage. “So I think for us, the analogy is almost perfect,” Shpigelmacher said. But instead of a miniaturized submarine, Bionaut Labs’ devices, which they term “bionauts,” look something like tiny screws. The smaller microrobots are hundreds of nanometers in size while the largest measure in the millimeter range. “It’s a tiny object
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