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New medicine may have its
own mind
By Ginny You
Staff Writer
Imagine a medicine that can monitor how much is
needed for a headache. Once digested, the medicine takes on its own
mind and spits out the needed amount of painkillers for that individual
person.
Jillian Buriak, associate professor of chemistry,
along with Michael Stewart, a postdoctoral student, have found how to
pinpoint the light-emitting properties of porous silicon, which makes
it possible to stabilize a material’s surface and guide it in reacting
to specific chemical surroundings.
This, in turn, provides companies such as pSiMedica
(porous silicon medical) to take what Buriak and Stewart discovered
and incorporate it into their researches and laboratories. They can
do this and create products such as a headache type of aspirin with
its own mind and other breakthrough technologies such as in opto-electronics
or integrating light-emitting devices with silicon chips.
Buriak and Stewart’s results were published
in the 32nd issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
They use what is called dry delivery systems, which
some of the technicians at Purdue are licensed to be involved in. According
to Buriak, since the drug ideally should have a concentration in one
spot, a company based on porous silicon such as pSiMedica makes a chip
that one can eat. On the silicon, it has electronics, and the pSi porous
silicon tells the chip to release slowly the amount the body needs.
This process, which Buriak says can change the
form of porous silicon, is examined through a nanometer scale, or cut
in half until it is one-billionth of a meter.
"We look at things in the nanometer scale
such as when you take a cap pen and keep cutting it in half until you
get 10 nanometers or less, the properties of it change," said Buriak.
"The color of it also changes. It may no longer be blue; it could
be red or yellow. It’s because properties become dependent on size."
According to Buriak, silicon is a poor source to
light, but during the 1990s in England, silicon was put into nanoscales
and suddenly it became a good source of light. They emit light as nanocrystalline
silicon, a form of porous silicon in billionths of a meter scale, due
to the negative electrons’ reaction to light.
"Nanocrystalline emits light," said Buriak.
"When you shine a light on it, the negative electrons move and
leave space, and the positive charge is left over. And the remaining
elements meet up and emit light of a new color."
Along with being a source of light in nanometer
scales, silicon can also undergo intense surface chemistry, where one
can manipulate it to contain chosen properties to serve as a specific
purpose in a research, laboratory, or public use. One example is by
making a photo pattern on it, which Buriak calls masking.
"You can make a photo pattern, like the sunburn
a tank top leaves," said Buriak. "If you emit orange light
with part of it masked, then when the reaction is driven by white light,
the masked part has no reaction. So if you want one molecule to be detected,
then you can mask it to distinguish it."
Also by breaking silicon down into such a small
scale, it becomes stabilized and does not dissolve. According to Buriak,
this is important for direct contact with plasma or biomedical applications
"Silicone is unstable," said Buriak.
"Take a sample and put it in poor conditions so it doesn’t
emit light and then you stabilize it, which is important for direct
contact with plasma, or biomedical applicants. We can stabilize and
it doesn’t dissolve. You can say I want this here and not this
here."
Further research Buriak hopes to see involves a
chip similar to the aspirin-like painkiller, but for diabetics. Another
hopeful silicon product would be growing carbon nanotubes or cells to
interface with silicon directly to the computer to function as a pacemaker,
telling the heart when to beat. According to Buriak, people hope for
interfacing with neurons and brains initiating cell growth in spinal
injuries.
Medical links to silicon are valuable, Stewart
admits, but he adds that there will be other uses that will prevail
as well, and his and Buriak’s work were the building blocks for
future silicon developments.
"The other side is this kind of silicon may
be used in future generation lasers of ships that use light, in opto-electronics,
fiber optics in phones," said Stewart. "Most of our research
was fundamental, but it will be part of the future. It’s not directly
used in the industry. Like in most researches, they discover something
small and it turns out to be useful in the larger, real world picture."
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