This Robotic Medical Tapeworm Mimics the Real Parasite to Invade Your Body

It’s the medical innovation that no one asked for. Scientists have just created a synthetic version of a tapeworm’s tiny hook-filled head—a perhaps unnerving invention that might actually make some drugs or tests easier to deliver.

Researchers at Harvard University developed the robo-tapeworm anchor, hoping to improve on existing methods of latching onto bodily tissue. In lab experiments testing their creation, they found that it was as sticky as intended. The spiky attachment could have a wide variety of uses, the researchers say, from improving drug delivery to making more convenient anti-theft devices.

Adult tapeworms survive by attaching themselves to their host’s gut and siphoning off nutrients from our body. Many, though not all, species of tapeworms accomplish this via a circular set of hooked “teeth” on their scolex, or head. While most of us would rather never think about a tapeworm and its feeding equipment, the Harvard researchers were instead inspired by it.

“Parasitic species have a rather dubious reputation with the general public due to their often terrifying body forms and unfamiliar lifecycles that seem straight out of science fiction movies,” said study researcher James Weaver, a biomedical engineer at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, in a statement from the university. “Despite this fact, it is important to realize that these species are particularly well adapted for anchoring into a wide range of different host tissue types using a remarkably diverse set of species- and tissue-specific attachment organs.”

A high-speed video (8000 frames per second) showing how the device’s hooks are deployed. © Maquignaz et al/PNAS Nexus

There are existing technologies that lift some aspects of the tapeworm as a means of securing long-lasting drugs or medical sensors to a person’s internal tissues or organs. But Weaver and his co-authors wanted to create a fully realized, if synthetic, facsimile of a hooked scolex—a tall feat, given how tiny and surprisingly complex these structures are. Still, with the help of experts in robotics, medical device design, and invertebrate zoology, the team was able to develop a prototype. The millimeters-long attachment is made out of stainless steel and polymers.

They tested their prototype on medical hydrogels that could simulate body tissue. Across the board, they found that it could easily attach to any of the tested materials, with its only limitation on stickiness being the actual strength of the tissue.

“These results demonstrate the efficacy of parasite-inspired deployable designs as an alternative to, or complement to, existing tissue attachment mechanisms,” the scientists wrote in their paper, published this week in the journal PNAS Nexus.

The findings are only a proof of concept for the team’s creation, meaning it will take more research to confirm its feasibility. But they were able to make their prototype cheaply with relative ease, an important consideration for any future plans of mass production. And should their device pan out, the researchers envision a wide array of uses for it.

It could be used to precisely deliver extended-release drugs to specific parts of the body with minimal tissue damage, for instance, or to implant diagnostic tests or sensors that keep track of metrics like body temperature or levels of a medication. Since it so closely resembles a tapeworm scolex, the attachment could also serve as a model in the lab to better understand how these parasites physically affect our bodies. And outside of medicine, the tapeworm tech could be used in reversible tags that attach to wildlife or in temporary anti-theft devices used at retail stores, the researchers note.

Those all sound like very useful and practical applications. But let’s just hope no one ever thinks to create a bigger version of this that could be attached to a Boston Dynamics robot dog or something—the world is scary enough as is.