Light force-powered cellular medical micromachines

TL;DR

This paper reviews light-powered cell-based micromachines for precision medicine, highlighting their potential and challenges.

Contribution

It introduces five categories of light force-powered cellular micromachines and their biomedical applications.

Findings

Cell-based micromachines offer enhanced precision and minimal invasiveness for medical applications.

Natural cells integrated with optical systems can overcome limitations of synthetic micromachines.

Applications include drug delivery, surgery, and immunotherapy, with challenges like tissue penetration and phototoxicity.

Abstract

With the synergistic advancement of micro/nanotechnology and intelligent control systems, medical micromachines are emerging as promising alternatives to conventional diagnostic and therapeutic methods, offering enhanced operational precision and minimal invasiveness for precision medicine applications. However, most existing micromachines rely on artificial synthetic materials, which involve complex micro-nano fabrication and raise biosafety concerns regarding immunogenicity and limited long-term therapeutic efficacy in deep tissues. The integration of natural biological cells with programmable optical tweezer has opened new avenues to overcome these limitations, enabling precise behavioral regulation and in situ assembly of cell-based micromachines. This review systematically outlines the design strategies underlying five categories of light force-powered cellular micromachines, including chemotactic bacteria, photosynthetic microalgae, red blood cells (RBCs), immune cells and subcellular structures, and highlights their pioneering applications in targeted drug delivery, minimally invasive surgery and desired immunotherapy. Meanwhile, it also addresses key challenges such as limited tissue penetration depth, phototoxicity management and operation intelligence, while suggesting future directions like adaptive optics-driven swarm control, optomechanobiological coupling and bioprinting-integrated systems. Additionally, the convergence of photonic technology, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence is expected to advance these micromachines into next-generation biomedical platforms for health supervision and disease therapy in vivo.

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