"If you take sand and heat it to 500 degrees Celsius, nothing changes," said Bradley Smith, the Emil T. Hofman Professor of Science at the University of Notre Dame. This discovery happened by accident. The particles were microscopically small - a thousandth the diameter of a human hair. But like their larger counterparts marked "silica gel" in packages attached to newly purchased articles of clothing, these particles were porous and could retain a chemical.
In this case, that chemical was a blue dye used to detect tumors in mice. The brand-new dye, which had been developed in Smith's lab, was taking a long time to enter the narrow pores in the particles. High-resolution electron microscopy images showed that not only had the dye-infused, but the silica particles themselves had also changed shape.
This discovery offers a new tool for making existing drugs more effective. We can create updated versions of existing drugs that could be more effective or have fewer unwanted side effects. Amine-containing drugs have certain chemical attributes that speed up the degradation and reforming process in silica. We can discover in the lab how natural processes work, and then can use that knowledge and mimic those processes to design something completely new. This discovery was made possible with funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Story Source:
Materials provided by the University of Notre Dame. Originally written by Brett Beasley.
Journal Reference:
Cassandra C. Shaffer, Canjia Zhai, Jordan L. Chasteen, Tatyana Orlova, Maksym Zhukovskyi, Bradley D. Smith. Silica nanoparticle remodeling under mild conditions: versatile one-step conversion of mesoporous to hollow nanoparticles with simultaneous payload loading. Nanoscale, 2022;
Web source:
By Jaideep Khandekar.
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