The Fantastic Voyage coming soon to an OR near you
A miniature capsule is injected into a patient’s spine and finds its way into the brain, where a fast-growing tumor threatens imminent and painful death. Locked onto its deadly target, the robotic capsule releases its payload of targeted chemotherapy directly into the tumor, and then heads for home.
Not since Raquel Welch was shrunk and inserted into a patient’s bloodstream in the 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage” have doctors come so close to targeting life-saving medication so precisely to reach the inaccessible recesses of the human body.
Bionaut Labs, an Israeli startup, has developed a tiny micro-robot that is set to follow in the slipstream of Ms. Welch and her microscopic medics. The miniaturized capsule can safely go where no medicine delivery system has gone before: the innermost regions of the brain.
Michael Shpigelmacher, the company’s co-founder and CEO, got the idea while working as a McKinsey consultant for large pharmaceutical manufacturers, which brought back childhood memories of the movie. Even as they tried to improve the effectiveness of their treatments, they usually ended up “carpet bombing a patient’s body with drugs, which caused widespread undesired side effects or damage to surrounding tissue and organs,” he says.
“Often, the condition being treated was very focal, like a tumor, yet there we were, flooding the whole body. It was like having one dirty dish in the sink and bringing out a fire hose that floods the whole house just to wash that single dish,” he recalls.
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE
