Clear your clogged arteries with nanoburrs

William Atkins
Saturday, 23 January 2010 20:50

Science - Biology

U.S. lead researchers from MIT and Harvard University have developed nanoparticles called nanoburrs that attach to damaged arteries and release medicine to open clogged arteries and repair injured ones. The new nanoparticles could vastly improve the repair and treatment of such cardiovascular problems in humans.


Their research is published in the January 19, 2010 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The article is titled “Spatiotemporal controlled delivery of nanoparticles to injured vasculature” (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914585107).

And, its lead authors are Dr. Robert Langer (Department of Chemical Engineering and Division of Health Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge) and Dr. Omid C. Farokhzad (Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials, Department of Anesthesiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts).

Their collaborators in the research and paper are from the University of California at San Diego, University of Illinois, Harvard Medical School, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They state in the abstract to their paper that their work in designing nanoparticles for medical applications has major challenges. One such challenge is to find the optimal size of nanoparticles that are designed to be delivered to artery walls.

To develop nanoparticles that can deliver cancer drugs to artery walls, these researchers created what they call “nanoburrs.”

Page two describes nanoburrs, and how the MIT and Harvard researchers use them to unclog arteries.