A Boston-based team led by a professor at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston is developing a new tool to help fight colon cancer — a "swimming capsule" pill, according to a WCVB.com report.
The swimming capsule is designed to control steering of capsule endoscopes, which are not usable for cancer screenings because they cannot be steered and do not always provide visual access to the full colon.
The swimming capsule it is under development by a team led by Nobuhiko Hata, PhD, professor of radiology at Brigham and Women's. Dr. Hata has already demonstrated how a plastic prototype of the swimming capsule can move through water using an MRI to control its direction.
He says it could take 5-10 years before the swimming capsule in available to physicians, according to the report.
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