'Fish Out of Water'

Carlos Daez
Staff Reporter

Here comes the future there now exist robotic fish tiny enough to travel through and
detoxify the circulatory system of a human body.

The nanotechnology (tiny robotics) department at the University of California-San

Diego has brought us closer to greater medical efficiency with the invention of microfish.
These fish, shaped and engineered to move like their living counterparts, are each smaller
and thinner than a quarter-inch snippet from a strand of hair. Grouped into 'schools', they are
designed to be injected into a patient to detect and treat harmful toxins.

Each fish comes with a magnetic head and a vaccine-infused body. When inserted into
a liquid, specialists can control the schools' movements with external magnets. For the first
test, the experiment's participants laid out a petri dish containing a toxic solution. They then
added the antitoxin-carrying fish, and after 'guiding' them through the environment, a
decrease in toxicity was observed. As if this was not cool enough, another interesting feature
of the fish is that when monitored under special conditions, they 'glow in the dark'; the closer
or stronger a toxin is, the greater the intensity of the robots' built-in red light.

While scientific journal Advanced Materials1 credits UCSD professor Joseph Wang
with the precision aspect of the robot, it is the 3D-printing expertise of fellow visionary
professor Shaochen Chen that allows the fish to be produced in large quantities. Mr. Chen
has developed a method to rapidly print the robots, permitting several hundred to be printed in
a few seconds. Given their satisfaction and success, the team has plans to replicate more
animals for later experiments, including sharks, stingrays, and birds.

Even though the microfish are not yet ready for human testing, Dr. Wei Zhu, head of
the host department, summarizes the group's effort as a contribution specifically for the fields
of health and medicine: The neat thing about this experiment is that it shows how the

1 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201501372/full
microfish can doubly serve as detoxification systems and as toxin sensors.2 Another
exciting possibility we could explore is to encapsulate medicines inside the microfish and use
them for directed drug delivery, shares optimistic colleague Dr. Jinxing Li3.

In various interviews, the 'fishermen' have implied readers to imagine being attacked
by a venomous species; perhaps there will be an instance in the future where everybody will
carry several syringes of poison-treating microfish. Considering the breakthroughs we have
just encountered, that future seems more and more likely.

2 http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/16264/20150826/3-d-printing-microfish-more-swim-3d-printing.htm
3 http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=1797