We never thought we’d be discussing the role of sperm cells in microrobotics, but it’s 2025, so it’s probably about time. Scientists from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have published a paper in Nature titled Sperm cell empowerment: X-ray-guided magnetic fields for enhanced actuation and localization of cytocompatible biohybrid microrobots.
If that’s all a bit much to take in, the folks behind this fresh load of innovation reckon they’ve discovered a way to turn the humble wiggly tadpole thing into a medical delivery system. Of course, that’s already what it does, albeit in a very specialised manner (it’s where babies come from, kids). But the researchers from Enschede believe they can also make these gooey wads do other things, better than they already do.
Could we call a serious investor a ‘sperm whale‘?
So-called biohybrid microrobots have been a popular field of study in recent years. Targeted delivery of medications to problem areas without poking patients with long needles (one method), opening them up and sticking the meds in (another possibility), or simply saturating the subject and hoping some of it goes where it should. Putting teeny little robots inside humans was never going to be easy, no matter what Innerspace would have you believe.
These new microbots, “a fusion of biological cells and artificial components,” can be directed through a subject by clever use of magnetic fields. The Dutch scientists demonstrated microbots “fabricated by electrostatic self-assembly of bovine spermatozoa and magnetic nanoparticles, resulting in flexible swimmers that can be actuated by rotating magnetic fields and successfully loaded with cancer drugs for cargo delivery inside the female reproductive tract.” But that was just the first step.
Further efforts put the tendency for the little white critters to clump together to “increase the cargo load and imaging contrast by clinical imaging modalities,” meaning that the spooge-based drug delivery a) delivered more drugs to a specific location, b) was easier to control, and c) was visible via X-ray fluoroscopy.
The benefits include better-targeted drug delivery, but it also offers potential for fertility treatments. These microbots won’t guide flagging squigglers to their final destination, but they do offer the ability to observe what’s going on inside a uterus around the time of conception and potentially develop better treatments based on that new understanding. The other benefits of these sperm-templated microrobots include “longer shelf-life and operation time, full directional and speed control, and easy fabrication.” That bit about fabrication… isn’t what you think it is, even if it’s also entirely true for what you’re actually thinking.
If you’d like to wade deeper through the medical terminology, the Nature paper is linked below.
