Micro-rockets provide a completely new approach to surgery. Our vision is to shrink the surgeon by a million times, to actively perform operations at the fundamental scale of the cells and cell machinery. It also provides an opportunity to interact with and rebuild tissues at the scale of their basic building blocks.
Micro-rockets use the water in our bodies as fuel, can be guided with a magnetic field, and designed to either dissolve in the body or be extracted. They are cheap to produce, and simple to store and transport. We are interested in three main modes of application: to drive a new generation of microsuturing, weaving rather than stitching weak tissues back together; to drive a functional scaffolds into surrounding tissues, forming a continuous integration of biomaterials to the host and building functional gradients between them; and as a mechanism for transport of therapeutics across the blood-brain barrier.
