An artist's
representation of the nanoparticle removal chip developed by researchers in
Professor
Michael Heller's lab at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
An oscillating
electric field (purple arcs) separates drug-delivery nanoparticles (yellow
spheres)
from blood (red
spheres) and pulls them towards rings surrounding the chip's electrodes.
The image is
featured as the inside cover of the Oct. 14 issue of the journal Small.
Image credit:
Stuart Ibsen and Steven Ibsen.
(November 23, 2015) Engineers
at the University of California, San Diego developed a new technology that uses
an oscillating electric field to easily and quickly isolate drug-delivery
nanoparticles from blood. The technology could serve as a general tool to
separate and recover nanoparticles from other complex fluids for medical,
environmental, and industrial applications.
Nanoparticles, which are generally one thousand times
smaller than the width of a human hair, are difficult to separate from plasma,
the liquid component of blood, due to their small size and low density.
Traditional methods to remove nanoparticles from plasma samples typically
involve diluting the plasma, adding a high concentration sugar solution to the
plasma and spinning it in a centrifuge, or attaching a targeting agent to the
surface of the nanoparticles. These methods either alter the normal behavior of
the nanoparticles or cannot be applied to some of the most common nanoparticle
types.
“This is the first example of isolating a wide range of
nanoparticles out of plasma with a minimum amount of manipulation,” said Stuart
Ibsen, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of NanoEngineering at UC San
Diego and first author of the study published October in the journal Small.
“We’ve designed a very versatile technique that can be used to recover
nanoparticles in a lot of different processes.”