What cooler way to deliver drugs (the good kind that saves lives) to your system than by shooting nanorockets through your body’s system? Not only is this supposedly a faster method of delivery, but will also be able to target specific areas of the body to deliver the drugs to.
Originally designed to be used with rocket fuel, naturally having rocket fuel in our bodies can’t be a good thing due to their toxicity, but thanks to Samuel Sanchez and his colleagues at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden, Germany, they have managed to come up with a nanorocket that uses a much less toxic variant of rocket fuel.
To be more specific, these nanorockets are not rockets per se, but rather nanotubes that have been filled with rocket fuel. What the researchers have done now is that they have coated the tubes with platinum both inside and outside. The tubes when placed in a warm and weak solution of hydrogen peroxide catalyzed the decomposition of peroxide, thus causing bubbles to come out from one end of the tube and generating thrust in the opposite direction.
The team has even come up with a way to “steer” these tubes with the use of a magnetic field, which will help to regulate the speed at which the tube travels as well. Unfortunately even though it’s considerably less toxic than regular rocket fuel, the 0.25% of peroxide used is still not entirely safe. It looks like it’s back to the drawing board for them, although we’ll have to admit that this is a pretty cool idea.
Filed in . Read more about Germany, Medicine and Scientists.