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Precision medicine is a new model of healthcare based on clinical diagnosis and patient bioinformatics analysis that takes into account each patient's individual differences in genes, environment, and lifestyle when providing disease diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. Unlike traditional “one-size-fits-all” clinical and healthcare, precision medicine allows physicians and researchers to predict, design, and implement optimal or specific treatments for specific patients. The key to achieving this goal is to acquire and analyze sufficient information about the patient's biological and physiological pathology and to utilize the guiding medical data to achieve patient-specific treatments. In recent years, advanced medical devices such as medical nano-/micro-robots, wearable/implantable biosensors, and human organ-on-chips (OOCs) have emerged to enable targeted delivery of drugs/cells, precise monitoring of physiological conditions, and assessment of patient response to customized drug combinations. Nonetheless, the design and fabrication of these precision instruments still require engineering innovations.
The main point of this paper
Medical micro-robotics:
Used to navigate movement within the human body to enable microscopic therapy.
Can work under external stimulation or self-propulsion.
Facilitates targeted therapy, minimally/non-invasive surgery and medical imaging.
Micro-Robotics Manufacturing Technologies:
Includes physical vapor deposition, laser direct 3D printing, electrochemical deposition and wet chemical synthesis.
Facing the challenge of low-cost, large-scale production of functional micro-robots.
Biosensors:
Wearable and implantable, sensing changes in target analytes through biological components.
Translated into measurable signals to monitor patient status.
Requires high sensitivity, biocompatibility, flexibility and long-term stability.
Organ-on-Chip (OOC):
Create miniature human tissue/organ models on partitioned microfluidic chips.
Provides more relevant physiological reproduction compared to animal and planar cell models.
Utilizes patient-isolated cells to create patient-specific pathological microenvironments.
OOC Challenges and Prospects:
Advances in materials and manufacturing technologies will increase the complexity and reliability of OOC.
Enhanced biomimetic reflections to expand applications in precision medicine.
Electrospinning Technology:
Obtaining continuous fibers from polymer solutions or melts.
A wide range of functional materials and structures such as nanofibers, microbeads and porous membranes can be produced.
Widely used in biomedical products.
Challenges of electrospinning technology:
Chaotic fiber deposition, lack of functional integration, and low production efficiency.
Toxic solvents used in the process limit the involvement of biological elements.
Limits its application in precision medicine.
Importance of electrospinning technology:
Electrospinning technology is critical in the field of precision medicine for the fabrication of medical devices such as nano/micro-robots, wearable/implantable biosensors, and organ-on-a-chip systems, which are capable of accurately acquiring and analyzing patients' physiopathological information and targeting therapies
Challenges of electrospinning technology:
Challenges to electrospinning technology include drug stability, scale-up production and regulatory requirements. Organic solvents can lead to drug degradation and new electrospinning methods need to be developed to avoid the use of organic solvents
Electrospinning technology is currently difficult to achieve large-scale production, and new electrospinning equipment and processes need to be developed to improve production efficiency
The use of electrospinning technology in biopharmaceutical delivery systems needs to meet stringent regulatory requirements, including safety, efficacy and quality control.
Prospects for the application of electrospinning technology:
The application of electrospinning technology in biopharmaceutical delivery systems is promising and is expected to play an increasingly important role in the biopharmaceutical field as the technology continues to advance.
Recent advances in electrospinning technology:
Multiple nozzles can increase the yield of electrostatically spun nanofibers, but there are problems such as needle clogging and jet interaction. Therefore, many nozzle-less electrostatic spinning methods have emerged to obtain high yields of nanofibers
Bubble electrostatic spinning technology employs high-voltage electrostatics and applied airflow, etc., as the driving force to overcome the surface tension of bubbles, thus generating multiple jets
The jet electrostatic spinning technique combines a conical polymer nozzle and a copper reservoir device with a rotating drum as the receiving device, and is used to prepare ordered nanofibers in batch quantities
Biomedical applications of electrospinning technology:
The fibers prepared by electrospinning technology have a nano-diameter comparable to the size of many cells in vivo, and their higher porosity and better pore connectivity can promote cell attachment, proliferation and differentiation, and the electrostatic spinning process is easy to obtain nanofibers with a three-dimensional structure, which is a special advantage for in vitro cell culture and simulation of extracellular matrix structure
Coaxial electrostatic spinning technology is a major breakthrough in electrostatic spinning technology in recent years, the principle is the same as that of electrostatic spinning, the improvement lies in the use of two capillary tubes with different inner diameters but coaxial, so that the sprayed core and surface materials form a concentric laminar flow of liquid, which becomes composite nanofibers with a core/shell structure after stretching and curing.
Electrospun Nanofbers are widely used in medical applications due to their excellent properties of high specific surface area and mimicking extracellular matrix. With the development of advanced electrospinning technology, progress has been made in increasing material diversity, optimizing material properties and commercialization. As a result, advanced electrospinning technology has provided a practical means for the development of precision medicine, as well as fostered the growth of the field.
Although electrospinning technology has been used to design advanced biomedical devices, future research should focus on further exploiting its potential to extend and improve its application in precision medicine. For example, various shapes, such as spiral, tubular, spherical, and cell-mimicking, have been designed for medical microrobots in order to realize different movement patterns. Nevertheless, among the limited pioneering work, only advanced electrospinning techniques have realized sperm- and rocket-like structures. However, in combination with other fabrication techniques (e.g., 3-D printing and electrospray), electrospinning will most likely be extended to fabricate other types of microrobots, including spiral and bead-shaped robots, as more complex structures (e.g., scaffolds and drug spheres) have been fabricated previously
