Assessment of navigation control strategy for magnetotactic bacteria in microchannel: toward targeting solid tumors

This paper presents a Magnetotactic Bacteria (MTB) navigation and aggregation technique that allows targeting without prior knowledge of the exact architecture of the vessels network. The MTB's active motility combined with magnetotaxism (their ability to swim following the magnetic field direction) offer new possibilities for the delivery of drugs to tumors. Many tumor microenvironment parameters such as the malformed angiogenesis capillaries, the heterogeneous blood flow, and the high interstitial pressure affect the delivery of blood-borne drugs to the tumor. Microorganisms used as microcarriers might be helpful in bypassing these limitations while helping to uniformly distribute the drug in the targeted area. Since the angiogenesis network of blood vessels that the tumors recruit is highly disorganized and unpredictable, the magnetic control method adopted account for these parameters to achieve targeting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method using a microchannel network offering a complex pattern considered as a worst-case navigation situation. Besides targeted drug delivery to tumor sites using bacterial carrier, aggregation of microorganisms is required for micromanipulation and microassembly.