What if doctors could steer medicines through the body using magnets, delivering treatments directly to places like tumors or damaged blood vessels?
A team of scientists and engineers at the University of Pittsburgh is working to make that idea a reality. They’ve developed new silk-iron microparticles—tiny, biodegradable carriers that can be controlled with magnets and used to deliver treatments with great precision.
These particles, called SIMPs (silk iron microparticles), were created by an interdisciplinary team led by Dr. Ande Marini, a Pitt graduate now working in surgery research at Stanford.
The team also includes bioengineers David Vorp and Justin Weinbaum, and their results were recently published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Their work was originally inspired by a desire to find better, less invasive treatments for abdominal aortic aneurysms, or AAAs.
These dangerous bulges in the main artery can be fatal if they burst and lead to nearly 10,000 deaths each year in the U.S. alone.
The team’s goal is to deliver regenerative therapies—like tiny healing capsules called extracellular vesicles—directly to the damaged site without surgery.
To do this, they had to find a way to guide the treatment to the exact location in the body. That’s when the idea of using magnets came in. They imagined using magnetic particles as carriers, much like a truck towing a trailer full of medicine.
To build these magnetic particles, the team partnered with nanomaterials expert Mostafa Bedewy and former student Golnaz Tomaraei.
The two created ultra-small iron oxide nanoparticles—each one about one-hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair—that can respond to magnets. These nanoparticles were then chemically attached to silk, a safe and FDA-approved material that breaks down naturally in the body.
The chemical bonding process used a compound called glutathione to help stick the magnetic nanoparticles to the silk.
This step was crucial to make sure the particles could move properly and stay intact during their journey through the body. The result is a tiny, magnetically responsive particle that could one day carry drugs to places that are otherwise hard to reach.
Right now, the SIMPs are just empty carriers. But the next step is to fill them with healing substances—whether it’s cancer-fighting drugs, tissue-repairing molecules, or other useful treatments. Scientists also hope to adjust their structure to better control how and when the drugs are released once they arrive at the target.
This research shows what can happen when people from different scientific backgrounds work together. If successful, this technology could help doctors treat diseases more effectively and with fewer side effects—bringing new hope to patients everywhere.
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