Back in the 60’s the movie Fantastic Voyage told the story of a group of scientists that were shrunk and injected into the bloodstream of a fellow scientist to try and save his life.

Despite various advances in robotics, and in particular nanotechnology, in the interim, such microscopic work largely remains science fiction.

Robotic sperm

That isn’t to say that things aren’t progressing apace however. A recent project has seen the creation of motorized ‘spermbots’ that help sperm that whilst healthy are not good swimmers find their way to the egg.

The aim of the project is to improve upon existing artificial insemination techniques that involve the introduction of a sperm into the woman’s uterus with a medical instrument.

The success rate with this existing method is around 30%, whilst IVF can be more effective but comes with correspondingly higher costs.

Each step of the IVF process comes with risks of failure, so the researchers from the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences in Germany wanted to come up with a better way of doing things.

They gained inspiration from previous work on micromotors, which involve the construction of tiny metal helices that can be fitted to the tail of a sperm. This will then allow the sperm to be controlled by a rotating magnetic field.

When the approach was tested in a lab environment it emerged that sperms could indeed be driven successfully to the egg so it could attempt to fertilize it.

Suffice to say, this is still very early stage work and a great deal of development is needed before it’s ready for clinical testing, let alone being let loose into the wider world, but it’s certainly a technology that is worth keeping an eye on.

You can learn more about it via the video below.



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