Soap-Like Bubbles Used as Nano-Containers to Develop a Tool to Deal with Future Pandemics More Efficiently

In a quest for pharmaceutical agents like new vaccines, the industry will regularly scan thousands of associated candidate molecules.

As specified in a Nanowerk report, a novel approach enables this to take place on the nanoscale, minimizing the utilization of materials and energy.

Over 400,000 different molecules can be synthesized and examined within an area smaller than a pinhead. The new approach, developed through a highly interdisciplinary study initiative in Denmark, promises to dramatically reduce pharmaceutical firms' amounts of energy, material, and economic cost.

This new approach works by employing soap-like bubbles as nano-containers. With DNA nanotechnology, several ingredients can be mixed within the containers.

Benefiting Pharmaceuticals

According to Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen Nikos Hatzakis, also the head of the team, the volumes are very small that the use of material can be compared to using one liter of water and one kilogram of material, rather than the whole volume of water in all oceans to test material equivalent to Mount Everest's entire mass.

The associate professor also said this is an unprecedented "save in manpower, energy, and initiative." Meanwhile, according to Ph.D. student Mette Malle, the article's lead author and presently Postdoc researcher at Harvard University, United States, saving infinitely amounts of time, manpower, and energy would be fundamentally essential for any synthesis development and assessment of pharmaceuticals.

The study published in Nature Chemistry was performed in collaboration between Hatzakis Group, the University of Copenhagen, and Associate Professor Stefan Vogel, University of Southern Denmark.

A Villum Foundation of Excellent Grant has backed it. More so, the resulting solution is called "Single-particle combination lipidic nanocontainer fusion based on DNA mediated fusion" or SPARCLD for short.

This breakthrough incorporates elements from normally quite distant disciplines, including nanotechnology, biochemistry, DNA synthesis, combinational chemistry, and even artificial intelligence (AI) discipline known, also known as Machine Learning. Hatzakis explained, that no single element in their solution is new, although they have never been combined seamlessly.

Fast Results

According to Malle, what they have is very near a live read-out. Meaning, one can continuously moderate the setup based on the readings, adding substantial additional value. He added, that they're expecting this to be a key factor for the industry wanting to apply the solution.

The individual researchers in this study, the University of Copenhagen report specified, have a lot of industry collaborations, yet they do not know which firms may want to apply the new high-throughput method.

Hatzakis explained, that they needed to keep things hush-hush since they did not want to risk for others to publish something similar before them. Therefore, he added, they could not engage in conversations with industry or with other scientists that may apply the technique in various applications.

A Substitute for Vaccines for Future Pandemics

A save bet, he elaborated, would be that both academic and industry groups that are part of synthesizing long molecules like polymers could be among the first to adopt the approach.

The same goes for ligands of importance for pharmaceutical development. A specific beauty is that it can be incorporated further, enabling the direct addition of a relevant application.

In this circumstance, examples could be RNA strings for the essential biotech tool CRISPR, a substitute for screening and detecting, and synthesizing RNA for vaccines for future pandemics.

A report about this revolutionary nanotechnology is shown on Health News's YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on Nanotechnology in Science Times.