Wireless medical robots, personalised cancer vaccines and heart valve replacements for children… Just some of this year’s standout medical innovations pitched during the Falling Walls and Berlin Science Week World Science Summit. More than 900 nominations from 111 countries, it seems the global pandemic hasn’t slowed big thinking from some of our brightest minds. Across the next four weeks, I’m going to share my picks for the Falling Walls Breakthroughs of the Year from fields such as climate science, technology, social science, and first up, medical. “Effective drug delivery to disease sites remains a major challenge in today’s medicine.” That’s Professor Simone Schürle who wants to improve the way drugs target specific parts of our bodies. Her secret weapon? Magnets. “We are working with a special strain of bacteria that can sense magnetic fields.” When the researchers put the bacteria into a microfluidic system and then applied rotating magnetic fields in various orientations, the bacteria followed, pulling along any nearby nanoparticles. In fact, the nanoparticles were pushed into model tissue three times faster than when magnets weren’t used. “Another part that has been bugging me was actually how we could more selectively apply these rotational magnetic fields at a human scale. And this is something I’ve been working with my team recently and we came up with a design, but we haven’t built it yet, so that is something I am eager to explore.”
