Ingestible devices are often used to study and treat hard-to-reach tissues in the body. Swallowed in pill form, these capsules can pass through the digestive tract, snapping photos or delivering drugs.
While in their simplest form, these devices are passively transported through the gut, there are a wide range of applications where you may want a device to attach to the tissue or other flexible materials. A rich history of biologically inspired solutions exist to address this need, ranging from cocklebur-inspired Velcro to slug-inspired medical adhesives, but the creation of on-demand and reversible attachment mechanisms that can be incorporated into millimeter-scale devices for biomedical sensing and diagnostics remains a challenge.
A new interdisciplinary effort led by Robert Wood, the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and James Weaver, of Harvard’s Wyss Institute, has drawn inspiration from an unexpected source: the world of parasites.
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