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Hydrogels Collapse Into Complex Shapes for Drug Delivery

In recent years, researchers have investigated hydrogels' potential in drug delivery, engineering them into drug-carrying vehicles that rupture when exposed to certain environmental stimuli. However, it's difficult to predict just how hydrogels will rupture, and up until now it's been difficult to control the shape into which a hydrogel morphs. Nick Fang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, says predicting how hydrogels transform could help in the design of more complex and effective drug-delivery systems.

Topics:
Drug Delivery Materials Medical Plastics

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    Transcript

    00:00:05 When we think about the most common way to deliver drugs we often think of pills. When you swallow a pill it travels to the stomach where it dissolves and releases its therapeutic contents tot he rest of the body. But often times a pill may carry too much of one drug or not enough of another.

    00:00:22 Excessive amounts of a drug can damage surrounding tissues while deficiencies can weaken its effect. Researchers are looking for ways to tailor "smart pills" to release drugs in very specific ways for more targeted, effective drug- delivery. The idea is that a pill may one day sense its

    00:00:39 target and change its shape to release drugs all at once or bit by bit, depending on a patients treatment plan. Now we could potentially use the tubular gel as a new delivery vehicle. Its almost like a robot but this robot actually controls the release by its own shape. At the very

    00:01:01 beginning they all look alike. They are all of a similar, tubular shape, but based on how the mechanical difference the tube feels in the environment they could release into different volumes and different direction. With this in mind, MIT researchers are studying hydrogels, materials commonly

    00:01:24 used to make pills, and looking at how these gels deform. They say that by knowing how these materials change shape scientists can make shape- shifting pills, designed to squeeze out drugs at specifically targeted areas in the body. Just to give you an example to heal bones this process usually

    00:01:44 takes in the order of months. However if we now have the capability to engineer the tubes and engineer the tissue scaffold so that we could control not only the time at which the cartilage is forming, but also to control the direction and the location of the release of growth factors based on now the shape of the

    00:02:09 scaffold, and we hope to see them really play a critical role as a drug delivery vehicle for tissue rejuvenation and tissue healing.