Researchers at the Israeli University of Bar-Ilan, near Tel Aviv, have developed a technology that can accurately track the movement of particles. Researchers have used invisible nano-diamonds that will soon replace injections.
This intravenous technology is already used in patches for nicotine, caffeine, contraception and pain relief, among others. But to target specific layers of skin, drug developers need to understand their “permeation profiles”, that is, how particles behave when they pass through the skin.
Large pharmaceutical companies are developing new treatments with invisible drug-coated particles, but they need to know exactly where they land on the skin to see if they will be effective.
Tiny carbon particles as small as a millionth of a millimetre will provide a safe and painless alternative to injections.
Laser technology indicates whether the nano diamonds are in the right place and at the right concentration for skin-to-skin treatments to work.
Excluding lasers, drug developers conducting clinical trials had to perform biopsies – an invasive and sometimes painful technique in which cells or tissues are taken – to see if the nano diamonds had found their mark.
professor Dror Fixler
Research director Professor Dror Fixler, director of the Bar-Ilan Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, said that this was “a major breakthrough in dermatology and optical engineering.”
“This could open the door to developing skin-first drugs with modern cosmetic preparations using advanced nanotechnology,” added Fixler.
This invention, nano diamonds is a very recent innovation. They are produced in the university’s chemistry department by detonating explosives inside a locked room.
This replicates the high pressure and high temperature conditions in which natural diamonds form below the surface of the earth.
The nano diamonds are then applied to the skin in a solution, a very fine powder mixed with a few drops of water. In laboratory experiments, the team used pig skin and measured the progression of nanodiamants after three hours.
The complication is to follow something that is only one millionth of a millimetre. It is quite difficult in all circumstances, but the skin tissue is cloudy: opaque and hard to see.
Currently, the only way to track the movement of the nano diamonds was to do a biopsy and then examine the sample with a high-power transmission electron microscope.
There was no other way to see the nanodiamants in situ. Now there is. Professor Fixler and his team combined a laser with an algorithm that allows them to “see” what’s happening.
The algorithm uses very complex mathematics to interpret a basic visual image and determine where the nano diamonds are. They are not actually visible, but the image captures data that allows the algorithm to understand their location.
“Most detectors, including eyes and cameras, detect the intensity of optical light waves,” Channa Shapira, a PhD student at Bar-Ilan, told NoCamels.
But there is a more complicated concept to understand, which you cannot really grasp, even mathematically, called phase. The phase is the imaginary part of the wave. It cannot be measured, but it contains a lot of important information. We take a set of images with a simple camera, and then we have an algorithm that reconstructs the missing phase,” said Shapira.
Patients are briefly exposed to a blue laser beam. An optical system then creates a three-dimensional image similar to a photograph, through which the optical changes in the treated tissue can be extracted and compared with the adjacent untreated tissue using the specially created algorithm.
This new generation of drugs can cross the skin and replace injections, and could target specific sites and the body. But to lead them, you must first be able to follow them to see how far they go and how they penetrate the skin. Imaging is limited when it comes to detecting nanoparticles in such a cloudy environment,” added Shapira.
Finally, on the immediate future of research, Shapira said: “Now we are moving in another direction of detection, such as knowing the concentrations of how nano diamonds penetrate into different layers of skin, epidermis, dermis and fat without visualizing them.”
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