Robeauté, France
Tentative title:
Medical Applications of MicroRobots and Practical Testing Environments
Abstract:
Current revolutions in medicine such as gene therapies, cell therapies and some immunotherapies are calling for local precision delivery mechanisms in the human body that emerging microrobots / nanorobots seem ideally suited to achieve. With actual medical therapeutic applications in sight, the main challenges of microrobotics are slowly switching from micro-fabrications and low Reynolds dynamics issues to practical testings in biomedical environments, ranging from phantom tissues & organs models to actual in vivo experiments.
Drawing from Robeauté's experience, we are first going to review some potential applications of microrobots / nanorobots in medecine. We will then focus on some of the current gaps to be bridged in the near future to successfully test out microrobots in more realistic biomedical settings such as: microrobotics-friendly theoretical modeling of biological tissues, accurate synthetic tissues/organs as well as in vitro/in vivo real-time visualisation.
Biography:
Bertrand Duplat is an inventor and entrepreneur specializing in robotics and 3D, with over 30 patents applications over the years. After a few years of research in robotics at McGill in Montréal under Pr Vincent Hayward, he cofounded and managed Virtools, developing a graphical prototyping tool for 3D interactivity, based on assembling individual behavior building-blocks, for video games and virtual reality. Virtools was later acquired by Dassault Systèmes. Starting in 2014, he co-designed and built with Jean-Baptiste Mouret an archeological robotic prototype ordered by the ScanPyramids mission - mission who discovered several unknown cavities in Khufu, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. He, then, initiated the Robeauté project -after six years of maturation- with a fantastic multidisciplinary team and international collaborations to develop a therapeutic micro-neurosurgical platform.