Mar 24, 2021 08:14 PM
Scientists create edible food packaging films from seaweed
https://www.zmescience.com/science/edibl...-24032021/
INTRO: Researchers and companies have been working for a while now on edible, cost-effective food films as a way to tackle food waste and plastic pollution. Now, an international team has taken it a step forward, creating a film based on sodium alginate – a well-known naturally occurring seaweed biopolymer.
Sodium alginate is a carbohydrate that can be used to form packaging fils, says Rammohan Aluru, a co-author of the paper describing the material, in a statement. It’s also stable enough to serve as packaging. Alginates are refined from different species of brown seaweeds such as the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera and Ascophyllum nodosum. They are currently used in many industries such as food, fertilizers, textile printing, and pharmaceuticals. Even dental impression material uses alginate as its means of gelling.
The film, created with natural ingredients, is safe for health and the environment, is water-soluble, and can dissolve by almost 90% in 24 hours. The researchers crossed-linked the alginate molecules with linked with a natural antioxidant ferulic acid, making the film strong, homogeneous, rigid, and capable of prolonging the life of the products... (MORE)
Tiny robots can now smuggle drugs into brain tumors
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/micro...in-barrier
INTRO: The future of medicine is going to be hand-delivered — but not by mail carriers. Instead, life-saving drugs will be parceled, smuggled, and transported in the body via tiny, self-propelled microbots. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics, a research team in China designed a new kind of bio-hybrid microbot that uses clever biological disguises to get even closer to the source of disease in the body in order to provide the most targeted (and effective) treatment.
The target of choice? Hard to treat illness epicenters like brain tumors.
Tiny microbots are nothing new. The same goes for disguising a robot as a bacteria or using magnets to move them through the bloodstream. But what makes this microbot design stand apart from the crowd is that it can cross one of the body’s toughest biological barriers: the blood-brain barrier (BBB.)
Designed to keep pathogens out and nutrients in, it has historically been difficult for microbots (which the body often recognizes as a foreign invader) to pass this last line of defense and get closer to potential tumors beyond it.
Zhiguang Wu, an author on the study and a professor at the Harbin Institute of Technology focusing on nanotechnology, says that the new microbots can overcome obstacles that have hindered many more conventional lines of medical treatment. “Such passive diffusion suffers from the long diffusion time, ineffectiveness, and block of biological barriers, which could result in strong side effects,” Wu tells Inverse. “The swimming micro/nanorobots, able to navigate into hard-to-reach tissues utilizing their active propulsion, hold considerable expectations for loading various drugs and actively swim toward the diseased sites for targeted drug transportation.” (MORE)
https://www.zmescience.com/science/edibl...-24032021/
INTRO: Researchers and companies have been working for a while now on edible, cost-effective food films as a way to tackle food waste and plastic pollution. Now, an international team has taken it a step forward, creating a film based on sodium alginate – a well-known naturally occurring seaweed biopolymer.
Sodium alginate is a carbohydrate that can be used to form packaging fils, says Rammohan Aluru, a co-author of the paper describing the material, in a statement. It’s also stable enough to serve as packaging. Alginates are refined from different species of brown seaweeds such as the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera and Ascophyllum nodosum. They are currently used in many industries such as food, fertilizers, textile printing, and pharmaceuticals. Even dental impression material uses alginate as its means of gelling.
The film, created with natural ingredients, is safe for health and the environment, is water-soluble, and can dissolve by almost 90% in 24 hours. The researchers crossed-linked the alginate molecules with linked with a natural antioxidant ferulic acid, making the film strong, homogeneous, rigid, and capable of prolonging the life of the products... (MORE)
Tiny robots can now smuggle drugs into brain tumors
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/micro...in-barrier
INTRO: The future of medicine is going to be hand-delivered — but not by mail carriers. Instead, life-saving drugs will be parceled, smuggled, and transported in the body via tiny, self-propelled microbots. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics, a research team in China designed a new kind of bio-hybrid microbot that uses clever biological disguises to get even closer to the source of disease in the body in order to provide the most targeted (and effective) treatment.
The target of choice? Hard to treat illness epicenters like brain tumors.
Tiny microbots are nothing new. The same goes for disguising a robot as a bacteria or using magnets to move them through the bloodstream. But what makes this microbot design stand apart from the crowd is that it can cross one of the body’s toughest biological barriers: the blood-brain barrier (BBB.)
Designed to keep pathogens out and nutrients in, it has historically been difficult for microbots (which the body often recognizes as a foreign invader) to pass this last line of defense and get closer to potential tumors beyond it.
Zhiguang Wu, an author on the study and a professor at the Harbin Institute of Technology focusing on nanotechnology, says that the new microbots can overcome obstacles that have hindered many more conventional lines of medical treatment. “Such passive diffusion suffers from the long diffusion time, ineffectiveness, and block of biological barriers, which could result in strong side effects,” Wu tells Inverse. “The swimming micro/nanorobots, able to navigate into hard-to-reach tissues utilizing their active propulsion, hold considerable expectations for loading various drugs and actively swim toward the diseased sites for targeted drug transportation.” (MORE)
