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Sci Tech
Porous material as drug-carrier
N. GOPAL RAJ
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Potential is only just being realised Large amounts of an anti-leukaemia drug adsorbed
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Why, one might wonder, would a scientist want to spend time coming up with materials that are full of holes. The answer lies in the sheer range of applications that such porous solids make possible.
Inorganic clusters
Over the last 15 years or so, a new class of porous materials has emerged that is a hybrid of inorganic clusters linked by organic molecules.
These materials represent one of the biggest breakthroughs in solid state science whose potential is only just being realised, according to Gérard Férey, of the Lavoisier Institute at the University of Versailles, in France.
Potential applications
“The domain is currently exploding, and there are so many potential applications that it is difficult to decide how to prioritise them.
The only limit is our imagination,” Dr. Férey has been quoted as saying in a press release issued by the European Science Foundation. One such vacuous material could see use as a carrier for drugs that would then be slowly released in the body.
In 2005, Dr. Férey and other scientists published a paper in Science about two highly porous hybrid materials to which they gave the labels MIL-100 and MIL-101. The former was made up of cells with a volume of over 380,000 cubic Angstroms while the latter had a cell volume of over 700,000 cubic Angstroms.
Joseph Hupp and Kenneth Poeppelmeier of the Northwestern University in the United States remarked in their commentary in Science on the paper that “a tablespoon of MIL-101 has the [internal] surface area of a half-dozen football fields.”
“As soon as we have this huge cage, after that we can do anything with that,” observed Dr. Férey who was in Kerala recently for the International Conference on Advanced Materials (ICAM 2008) at Kottayam.
In a paper published in 2006, Dr. Férey and his colleagues pointed out that such porous materials could “achieve both a high drug loading and a controlled release.”
The adsorption and drug release characteristics of MIL-100 and MIL-101 were tested using ibuprofen, the analgesic and anti-inflammatory medication. While the amount of the drug that MIL-100 could hold came to 35 per cent of its dry weight, the quantity that MIL-101 could carry worked out to 140 per cent of its dry weight. Tests showed these materials then gradually released the drug over several days.
Anti-cancer drugs
Now, the aim is to use ML-101 as a carrier for anti-cancer drugs, Dr. Férey told this correspondent. The first application, which had been patented, was against leukaemia in children.
Not only did the cage adsorb very large amounts of the anti-leukaemia drug, but it then released the drug over the period of a week.
As a result, in future people in therapy would need to receive the drugs only once a week, instead of daily, he pointed out.
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