A novel concept of steerable catheters actuated by muscle cells: the BioMeld project

Localized (targeted) therapies allow increasing the efficacy of treatments for several diseases, including cancer. Within this view, the BioMeld project aims at proposing a pipeline to guide the fabrication of an innovative intravascular steerable microcatheter, actuated on its tip by muscle cell contraction. A simulation framework streamlines the process of design quoting, manufacturing, verification, and reporting, thus significantly reducing error-prone manual steps and making the process more efficient. This new generation of steerable microcatheter, fostered by the unconventional kind of actuation provided by muscle cells, will be investigated throughout this project to target localized treatments of deeper and tortuous regions within the cardiovascular systems. In this work we report the overall project vision and we describe some preliminary results on the microcatheter design.