The magnetic drug delivery system (MDDS) is a key technology to reduce the side effects in the medical applications, and the magnetic force control is a very important issue in MDDS. In general, the high magnetic field along the axial direction and high magnetic field gradient along the longitudinal direction are very useful for MDDS. So, we proposed the new magnetic force control system that consists of superconducting magnet, high temperature superconductors (HTS) bulks or tapes and ferromagnetic substances. In this new system, the shielding currents in HTS bulks and tapes due to diamagnetism of the superconductor generate the magnetic field with same direction of external magnetic field, and we can control the magnetic field gradient along the longitudinal direction by the arrangement of the HTS bulks, tapes and ferromagnetic substances. In this study, the stacked GdBCO tapes without stabilizer were used in experiments and electromagnetic analysis based on finite element method (FEM) was carried out to optimize the arrangement of the superconductors and the irons. It was confirmed that the control of magnetic field gradient along the longitudinal direction was possible by arranging the HTS bulks, tapes and irons on the superconducting magnet and then it was possible to obtain a magnetic field higher than the external field. Crown Copyright (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.