Thrombosis-related diseases are the
primary cause of death in the
world. Despite recent advances in thrombosis treatment methods, their
invasive nature remains a crucial factor, which leads to considerable
deadly consequences. Soft magnetic robots are attracting widespread
interest due to their fast response, remote actuation, and shape reprogrammability
and can potentially avoid the side effects of conventional approaches.
This paper outlines a new approach to the thrombosis treatment via
reprogrammable magnetic soft robots that penetrate, hook, and extract
the plasma clots in a vein-mimicking system under applied rotating
magnetic fields. We present shape-switching bioinspired soft swimmers,
capable of locomotion by different mechanisms in vein-mimicking flow
conditions and whose swimming efficiency is similar to animals. Further,
we demonstrate the potential of a developed robot for minimally invasive
thromboextraction with and without fibrinolytic usage, including hooking
the plasma clot for 3.1 ± 1.1 min and extracting it from the
vein-mimicking system under the applied magnetic fields. We consider
an interesting solution for thrombosis treatment to avoid substantial
drawbacks of the existing methods.