Scientists from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne (EPFL) and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ) have manages to salvage some good from this scourge, however, by using the protozoa that causes the disease as the model for a new class of microbots designed to deliver drugs with precision and carry out other medical procedures such as clearing out clogged arteries and other forms of microsurgery.

Microbots have made great strides in recent years, with developments ranging from tiny experimental robots that can swim through the bloodstream to origami-like creations designed to be swallowed. But one of the tricky problems is figuring out how these microbots are supposed to propel themselves through a miniature world where standard propellers aren't very efficient.

Selman Sakar at EPFL and Hen-Wei Huang and Bradley Nelson at ETHZ are developing and testing a number of configurations of microbots that can not only move about, but can be produced quickly and in quantity using a new manufacturing technique. The result is a robot that can be controlled using an electromagnetic field and, when heated, can alter its shape.