Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal have coupled live, swimming bacteria to 150-nanometer beads to develop a self-propelling “nanobot” device steered through the body using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The bacteria swim at 200 microns/second using tiny corkscrewlike tails, or flagella, and are just two microns in diameter–small enough to fit through the smallest blood vessels in the human body. The beads are treated with antibodies so that the bacteria would attach to them. Ultimately, the researchers plan to modify the beads so that they also carry cancer-killing drugs.

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