Water-Immiscible Coacervate as a Liquid Magnetic Robot for Intravascular Navigation

Developing magnetic ultrasoft robots to navigate through extraordinarily narrow and confined spaces like capillaries in vivo requires synthesizing materials with excessive deformability, responsive actuation, and rapid adaptability, which are difficult to achieve with the current soft polymeric materials, such as elastomers and hydrogels. We report a magnetically actuatable and water-immiscible (MAWI) coacervate based on the assembled magnetic core-shell nanoparticles to function as a liquid robot. The degradable and biocompatible millimeter-sized MAWI coacervate liquid robot can remain stable under changing pH and salt concentrations, release loaded cargoes on demand, squeeze through an artificial capillary network within seconds, and realize intravascular targeting in vivo guided by an external magnetic field. We believe the proposed "coacervate-based liquid robot" can implement demanding tasks beyond the capability of conventional elastomer or hydrogel-based soft robots in the field of biomedicine and represents a distinct design strategy for high-performance ultrasoft robots.