A drug-carrying molecule designed to cure disease by slipping past the lung's natural defenses offers new hope for people with chronic or deadly respiratory diseases, say its creators, researchers in assistant professor Liheng Cai's Soft Biomatter Lab at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science. Cai and his team, including materials science and engineering Ph.D.
student Baiqiang Huang and biomedical engineering Ph.D. student Zhi-Jian He, successfully demonstrated the nanocarrier's effectiveness using the lab's own "micro-human airway.
" The device captures the geometric and biological features of human airways. They described their findings in a paper published June 27 in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano . Sneaking past our defenses Our lungs have layers of protection that trap and transport pathogens or inhaled particles out of the respiratory system to prevent us from getting sick.
Every time you blow your nose, the system is working. Unfortunately, those same barriers also stop medicine from reaching targeted cells, making it hard to treat diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pulmonary fibrosis." Baiqiang Huang, Ph.
D. student The new polymer is called bottlebrush polyethylene glycol, or PEG-BB. It moves quickly through the airway battlements by mimicking mucins, a natural glycoprotein responsible for the properties of mucus, which has the same bottlebrush shape -; a central backbone with a thicket of br.