Micro/Nanorobots for Combating Brain Disorders: Challenges, Advances, and Perspectives

Brain disorders pose a significant global health burden, underscoring the urgent need for innovative therapeutic strategies. Conventional treatments are often hindered by poor drug penetration, systemic side effects, and the complex biological barriers of the central nervous system. In recent years, micro/nanorobots (MNRs) have emerged as promising platforms to overcome these limitations. Operating at the micro- to nanoscale, MNRs can accomplish targeted biomedical tasks through self-propulsion (chemical or biohybrid) or external actuation (acoustic, optical, electric, or magnetic), thus enabling unprecedented precision in therapeutic delivery. This review systematically outlines the challenges in treating brain disorders, including major disease categories and barriers affecting therapeutic efficacy, and highlights emerging strategies addressing these obstacles. The principles of MNR propulsion and spotlight recent advances in applying MNRs is further summarized for brain disorder therapies, with special emphasis on the crucial roles of image guidance and real-time tracking in facilitating clinical translation. Finally, it discusses challenges and provides perspectives on future directions. Overall, the rapid development of MNRs holds transformative potential to reshape therapeutic paradigms and accelerate clinical translation for advanced brain disorder treatments.