Bottles and corks have proven themselves an excellent duo for delivering wine, beer, and spaghetti if you’re Italian. And now the same concept is being applied to deliver medicines to their targets, but instead of glass bottles and wood corks (and metal corkscrews), the microscale bottles are made of polystyrene and the corks are actually a phase-change material that goes from a solid to liquid when subjected to a bit of heating.
A team from Georgia Tech, Emory, and Yonsei University in Korea has developed these polystyrene bubbles that they are envisioning as being injectable into patients who would have a heating element placed at the target treatment site. Once the bubbles reach the area of heating, the phase-change material would dissolve and the contents released into the body close to where the drug would be most effective and cause least side effects on the rest of the body.
Study in Angewandte Chemie International Edition: Microscale Polymer Bottles Corked with a Phase-Change Material for Temperature-Co ntrolled Release