‘Soft Robots for Medicine’ voted among coolest Ohio State science stories of 2020

As the current year got underway, some were quick to adopt a don’t-look-back attitude to all things 2020. However, there was plenty of news from the last 12 months worth revisiting, courtesy of the scientists, engineers and other researchers at The Ohio State University.

 

Last year, Ohio State researchers published more than 20,000 journal articles, according to Ohio State News, which wrote about 180 of them. They published articles on research ranging from vampire bats to climate change.

 

All of those research stories were important, impactful and insightful… but which ones were the coolest? Ohio State News asked readers to help them decide.

 

Voted among the very coolest science stories of 2020 was “Soft robots, origami combine for potential way to deliver medical treatments,” featuring corresponding author of the paper and IMR faculty member Ruike (Renee) Zhao.

 

Researchers found a way to send tiny, soft robots into humans, potentially opening the door for less invasive surgeries and ways to deliver treatments for conditions ranging from colon polyps to stomach cancer to aortic artery blockages.

 

The researchers from Ohio State and the Georgia Institute of Technology detailed their discovery, which makes use of the ancient Japanese practice of origami, in a study published Sept. 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The story, which was voted runner-up among the five nominees this year, gained quite a bit of attention, with even the Ohio State student newspaper reporting on the achievement. Check out the Lantern’s article and video featuring Zhao in the lab here.

 

 

Read the full story and video produced by the Institute for Materials Research (IMR) here.

 

Under this system, doctors would use magnetic fields to steer the soft robot inside the body, bringing medications or treatments to places that need them, said Zhao, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. Zhao joined Ohio State in 2018 through the Materials and Manufacturing for Sustainability Discovery Theme, operated by IMR. She is the director of the Soft Intelligent Materials Laboratory.

 

“The robot is like a small actuator,” Zhao said, “but because we can apply magnetic fields, we can send it into the body without a tether, so it’s wireless. That makes it significantly less invasive than our current technologies.”

 

That soft robot is made of magnetic polymer, a soft composite embedded with magnetic particles that can be controlled remotely. Robotic delivery of medical treatment is not a new concept, but most previous designs used traditional robots, made of stiff, hard materials.

 

The “soft” component of this robot is crucial, Zhao said.

 

“In biomedical engineering, we want things as small as possible, and we don’t want to build things that have motors, controllers, tethers and things like that,” she said. “And an advantage of this material is that we don’t need any of those things to send it into the body and get it where it needs to go.”

 

The soft origami robot in this case can be used to deliver multiple treatments selectively based on the independently controlled folding and deploying of the origami units. The origami allows the material to “open” when it reaches the site, unfurling the treatment along with it and applying the treatment to the place in the body that needs it.

 

Visit Ohio State News to read about the first-place story and other finalists.