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Getting drugs to go just where you want them inside the human body is no easy task, and using high doses of chemicals that are carried by the bloodstream to the wrong tissues or organs can lead to toxic side effects.
That’s why scientists have been working for years to figure out how to deliver much smaller doses to precise targets—developing chemotherapy drugs that bind only to tumor cells, for instance. Now researchers have developed a new method that traps drugs or other molecules within tiny cages made of DNA, then releases them once they’ve reached the right spot with a quick flash of light.
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“Basically it’s sort of a controlled drug release, and there wasn’t a very good approach [to that] until now,” says Xue Han, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University and author of the new study published in the journal ACS Nanoletters. “What we did is to put these drugs physically inside a cage.”
Read full, original post: DNA ‘cages’ deliver drugs with zap of light
