Imagine that your doctor has just given you a drug injection. The drug will take some time to travel through your blood to its destination, say your liver. The drug must eventually reach a concentration in your organ where it won’t be so high that it will harm you, but will be sufficiently high enough to pack punch. Ideally, you’d like your medicine delivered to the right cells at a constant rate so as to achieve the right concentration.
Kai Landskron and Geoffrey Ozin of the Materials Chemistry Research Group at the U of T Department of Chemistry are hoping to develop a system that may help deliver medicine in such a way. In a paper published in Science, they describe how they produced a highly organized porous material with holes that could potentially be shaped to fit certain drug molecules.
By manipulating the pores, drug molecules of various sizes and chemical makeups may be fit into and released from the pores in a controlled fashion. This way the drug can be released at a constant and appropriate rate. The aim is to design a material that could allow drugs to be absorbed through the skin, not unlike how nicotine patches work.
According to Landskron, “no special precautions are required in the lab during synthesis of these compounds.” He adds, “To my knowledge, there is no danger in applying such compounds to the skin.”
