The Heart Beats. Now They Are Building a Robot to Make Your Skin Feel Like It Does.

A wearable robot that beats like a heart — against your skin, against cancer.

Giulio Ciucci and Serena Zacchigna at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Trieste have spent years asking a deceptively simple question: why are cardiac tumors almost nonexistent? Less than 0.1% of cancer diagnoses originate in the heart. The answer, their research suggests, is the beat itself. Now they have built a device designed to take that protective effect outside the organ it was born in and apply it directly to melanoma tissue. The Science paper that published their mechanism last week is not the story. The wearable robot is.

CANCEL — the project name stands for something the team declines to spell out publicly — grew out of a conversation at a public science event in Trieste in 2021. Zacchigna, a cardiovascular biologist, and Domenico Prattichizzo, a robotics researcher at the University of Siena, found themselves discussing an oddity of heart biology: the organ does not regenerate after damage. Cut your skin, it regrows. Damage your heart, you get a scar. Zacchigna began to wonder whether the same mechanism that stops heart cells from dividing might also stop cancer cells from dividing inside the organ. By 2024, they had staged a theatre production about the idea at the Genoa Festival of Science. By October 2025, they had a working prototype described in EU outreach documentation, with collaborators at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. No news organization has yet reported on CANCEL in the context of the Science paper.

The mechanism behind it comes from their parallel line of work. In a heterotopic transplant experiment — grafting a donor heart into a mouse's neck to create an organ that remains perfused but bears none of a normal heartbeat's workload — Ciucci and Zacchigna showed that unloaded hearts permit cancer growth. The same cancer cells injected into a native, beating heart do not proliferate. Remove the mechanical load, cancer advances. Restore it, cancer retreats. When the team silenced Nesprin-2, a protein that transmits forces from a cell's exterior to its nucleus, the effect vanished: tumors formed inside beating hearts. Nesprin-2, the paper argues, is the sensor that makes the heartbeat's anti-cancer effect legible to the cell.

What the Science paper does not show is whether a wearable device can replicate this outside the chest. The adult human heart generates continuous rhythmic compression on its own tissue. A robot pressing against melanoma on the arm or leg would face different tissue architecture, different mechanical coupling, a different environment. Mouse models of cancer therapy fail to translate to humans at a high rate. The prototype has been presented at EU cross-border science events and described in outreach documentation — not yet in a peer-reviewed journal. Whether rhythmic external compression can meaningfully suppress tumor growth in people is an open question the paper does not answer.

But the device now has a mechanism to point to, and that changes the calculus. If a beating heart suppresses cancer through physical force transmitted by a specific protein, the idea of applying that force elsewhere is not speculation — it is an engineering problem. The entire history of cancer therapy has been biochemical: drugs, antibodies, cell-killing agents. A mechanical alternative, if it matures, would operate on entirely different economics, different regulatory pathways, and different competitive dynamics. Pharma has optimized its approach for decades. A robot can be worn.

Sources: [GEN News] (April 23, 2026); [ICGEB CANCEL Project] (October 2025); [ICGEB CANCEL Origins] (October 2024); [Science paper] (Ciucci and Zacchigna, 2026).