Scientists at the Israel Institute of Technology have created a robot designed to crawl inside the human body. Specifically, through your veins. The ViRob measures at a measly 1 millimetre by 4 millimetres will be able to crawl through everything ranging from water to blood to bile in order to treat diseases, specifically at cancer.

Cancerous tumours are notorious for being difficult to target and effectively kill. Think of whole body irradiation as carpet bombing your body. The good and the bad and the ugly get killed. With this type of technology, robots could crawl into your veins, identify a tumour and directly treat it with the correct drugs.

Here is an extract from Discovery magazine detailing the ViRob:

… thanks to tiny arms that help it grip vessel walls , ViRob is the first microbot that can tunnel between different body cavities. It’s controlled by an electromagnetic field outside of the robot that creates a vibration that propels ViRob forward.

In lab tests, the robot has traveled up to nine millimeters per second and can commute through body fluids ranging from blood to bile, making it a versatile tool that can race through a vein and burrow into an organ. Its designers even hope to accessorize it with equipment such as a wee camera and a mini pair of tongs, to get that close-up view of those alveoli at work.

Obviously this type of technology is in it’s infancy but with promising research being done, maybe this robot could pave the way to more advances in treating patients through technology. That’s of course before we get to the era of nanobots whereby the irreversible grey goo of death descends upon us and wipes out humanity.

Oh and also, the image at the top isn’t what’s going to be crawling through you, it’s a Replicator from Stargate. Just so none of you freak out if you think that things going to be inside you.