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Recent progress on the design and fabrication of micromotors and their biomedical applications

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Abstract

The advancement in the micro-/nanofabrication techniques has greatly facilitated the development of micromotors. A variety of micromotors have been invented with powerful functions, which have attracted a broad range of interests from chemistry, physics, mechanics, biology and medicine. In this paper, we reviewed recent progress in micromotors and highlighted representative works. The mechanisms of micromotors by internal and external energy sources were described. We described general fabrication strategies of the popular micromotors (wire, tubular, helical and Janus) including bottom-up and top-down approaches. In the application section, we primarily focused on the biological applications, such as biological cargo delivery, biosensing and surgery. At last, we discussed the current challenges and provided future prospects.

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Acknowledgements

X.X. and W.J. acknowledge the support from Institute for Advanced Study and School of Material Science and Engineering of Tongji University. L.M. acknowledges the support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 81501607 and 51875518), as well as the support from Development Projects of Zhejiang Province (Grant No. 2017C1054).

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  1. Wensen Jiang and Liang Ma have contributed equally to this review.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, 201804, China

    Wensen Jiang & Xiaobin Xu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems & School of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Liang Ma

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  1. Wensen Jiang
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Correspondence to Xiaobin Xu.

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Jiang, W., Ma, L. & Xu, X. Recent progress on the design and fabrication of micromotors and their biomedical applications. Bio-des. Manuf. 1, 225–236 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42242-018-0025-y

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