A Microscopic Submarine in My Blood

Sylvain Martel, fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and of the IEEE, is chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Micro-Nanorobotics and Automation and director of the NanoRobotics Laboratory at Polytechnique Montréal, Campus of the University of Montréal, Canada. He has received many awards, mostly in interdisciplinary research, and is a recipient of a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Medical Nanorobotics. He has developed several biomedical technologies, including platforms for remote surgeries and cardiac mapping systems, at McGill University and new types of brain implants for decoding neuronal activities in the motor cortex at MIT. Among other achievements, Prof. Martel’s research group is also credited for the first demonstration of the controlled navigation of an untethered object in the blood vessel of a living animal. At present, Prof. Martel is leading an interdisciplinary team involved in the development of navigable therapeutic agents and interventional platforms for cancer therapy. This research is based on a new paradigm in drug delivery pioneered by him and is known as direct targeting, where therapeutics are navigated in the vascular network toward solid tumors using the most direct physiological routes. This approach leading to a significant increase of the therapeutic index has been widely featured in The Globe and Mail, MIT Technology Review, New Scientist, The Economist, BBC, and Newsweek.

Introduction. The location. The interventional facility. The team at the planning briefing. The submarine. Miniaturization. Injection. Travelling in the artery. Tracking the position of the submarine. Propulsion and steering. Navigating in the bloodstream. The crew. Conclusion.