Scientists invent new material to improve drug delivery to patients

Western scientists have developed a new material that could eventually improve the way drugs are administered to patients, by allowing doctors to "see” exactly whether drugs are reaching the targets and working properly. Lijia Liu By combining a material already used to deliver medication to specific sites in the body with another that glows in the dark (optical probe), chemistry professor Lijia Liu and graduate student Ellie W.T Shiu have created a composite that can be used to track the path of a drug carrier through the human body. In the short term, the new approach could be used to monitor medication used for cancer and bone diseases - but it could eventually have a wide range of therapeutic applications. With the help of the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan, Shiu and Liu were able to see the interaction between the luminescent optical system and the drug carrier. Their findings were recently published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics. "Our optical probe is kind of like glow-in-the-dark paint or when you walk into a club wearing those [glow-stick] bracelets, and you can still see the light," says Liu. The probe designed by Liu and Shiu emits near infrared light and can be tracked by standard bioimaging techniques.