Smallest Man-Made Organic Particles Created

Don’t feel like para­phras­ing. Let’s just block quote –

Sci­en­tists who have cre­ated the small­est pre­cisely crafted organic par­ti­cles are billing their break­through as a poten­tial boon to med­i­cine and technology.The tiny struc­tures could one day be used as vehi­cles for deliv­er­ing drugs or genes into the human body or per­haps imag­ing you from the inside-out, the researchers said today. They might also find uses in electronics.

The nan­otech­nol­ogy indus­try has long been mak­ing strong claims, and this lat­est process is in its infancy. And it is no longer a big feat to make small things. Other sci­en­tists have cre­ated molecule-sized struc­tures and even micro­scopic motors in the nanome­ter range. A nanome­ter is a bil­lionth of a meter.

But tra­di­tional nano-products are made mostly of met­als and other inor­ganic mate­ri­als that must be baked, etched or processed with sol­vents that would destroy frag­ile DNA or drugs.

The new struc­tures are made of organic mate­ri­als with­out all the harsh trea­ment and can be con­structed as spheres, rods, cones, or trape­zoids. They could be made biode­grade­able to dis­inti­grate after inser­tion into the body.

“We believe that the par­ti­cles will offer break­throughs in the deliv­ery of ther­a­peu­tic, detec­tion and imag­ing agents for the diag­no­sis and treate­ment of dis­ease,” one of the study’s lead­ers, Joseph DeS­i­mone of the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina at Chapel Hill, told Live­Science. “In the elctron­ics indus­try, we believe we can make new mate­ri­als for high speed, high-resolution opti­cal displays.”

The new man­u­fac­tur­ing process is called Par­ti­cle Repli­ca­tion in Non­wet­ting Tem­plates, or PRINT, and was detailed in a recent issue of the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety. The work was sup­ported by the National Sci­ence Foundation.

DeS­i­mone and his col­leagues have formed a new com­pany, called Liq­uidia, to attempt to com­mer­cial­ize the discovery.