So what’s going on at that Ohio State among Chemistry Departments, Rice University, here in the New Year?
Plenty.
Our latest report comes from Andrew Barron, who holds the Duncan-Welch chair (Charles Duncan ’47 built Minute Maid, then became head of Coca-Cola after selling it).
Working with scientists at North Carolina State (go Wolfpack) Barron has found that buckyballs that are dosed with amino acids (drugs) will actually get through the skin more quickly if you flex it. Dose someone on the butt, put them on a bicycle, and the speed with which a drug is absorbed through the skin goes up.
"The findings were a bit surprising because the Bucky amino acids
tend to form spherical clusters that are up to 12 times larger in
diameter than the known width of intercellular gaps in the skin," Barron commented, but you report the results you get, not those you expected.
Figuring out the best way to get drugs containing buckyballs into the
skin is important. The findings indicate you’ll get faster dosing on
sites that are used, like biceps and active thighs, and slower uptake
on areas that don’t move, like the back or the head. The findings also
indicate that those with active lifestyles will dose themselves with a
bucky-patch faster than those who are sedentary.
What you might call Bucky-Medicine is one of the many applications of
buckyballs, molecules with 60 atoms of carbon that form into the shape
of a soccer ball, and were discovered at Rice in the mid-80s. After
buckyballs were discovered, another form called the buckytube or carbon
nanotube followed, in which the ball is not closed and the number of
atoms in the molecule is theoretically infinite.
It has taken 20 years to approach practical uses for buckyballs in medicine, but the journey has been worth it.
One more interesting fact about Barron’s latest paper. Its co-authors are two graduate students, NC State graduate student Jillian Rouse and Rice graduate student Jianzhong Yang. Yang is a post-doc and a good person to build a department around some day. Others whose names are on the paper (if not the press release) are Jessica P. Ryman-Rasmussen and Nancy A. Monteiro-Riviere, both of NC State. (Good to see other colleges figuring out how good female scientists can be.)
