Take One Onion...

For patients with multiple drug prescriptions, remembering what to take and when can be tricky – giving out the right drugs daily on hospital wards is a time-consuming task. Researchers have found a new way to deliver drugs in ‘slow-release’ packages that could make this easier. They created microscopic drug delivery molecules with multiple layers, like an onion, inspired by the natural outer layers of some bacterial cells. The molecules were made simply by mixing particles called dendrimers – which have similar properties to the components of our cell membranes – with water, which made stable layers form spontaneously. Drugs could be packaged and released slowly from these molecules, layer by layer, so that they don’t have to be taken repeatedly – or different drugs could be contained in different layers so they could be released in sequence, simplifying the drug administration process.

Written by Emma Saxon

Emma Saxon

Writer

In the final year of her PhD studying the predatory bacterium Bdellovibrio, Emma enjoys writing about quirky science research, and sorting science fact from myth in articles for the University of Nottingham's magazine, Impact.

• Image by Virgil Percec and colleagues
• University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Research published in PNAS, June 2014