Oliver Lieleg and PhD student Ceren Kimna use balls and pipe cleaners in different colors to visualize how nanoparticles can be bound together by DNA fragments. Such connections may become the basis of drugs that release their active ingredients in sequence.
Image: Uli Benz / TUM
It is becoming much more common for patients to be treated with several different medications. It is often necessary for the patient to take them at fixed intervals - a limitation that makes everyday life difficult and increases the risk of doses being skipped or forgotten. Oliver Lieleg , Professor of Biomechanics and a member of the Munich School of BioEngineering at TUM, and doctoral candidate Ceren Kimna have now developed a process that could serve as the basis for medications containing several active ingredients that would reliably release them in the body in a pre-defined sequence at specified times. "For example, an ointment applied to a surgical incision could release pain medication first, followed by an anti-inflammatory drug and then a drug to reduce swelling," explains Oliver Lieleg. "Ointments or creams releasing their active ingredients with a time delay are not new in themselves," says Oliver Lieleg. With the drugs currently in use, however, there is no guarantee that two or more active ingredients will not be released into the organism simultaneously. To test the principle behind their idea, Oliver Lieleg and Ceren Kimna used nanometer-sized silver, iron oxide and gold particles embedded in a special gel-like substance known as a hydrogel.
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