FED: Australian scientist in polymer breakthrough
By Danny Rose, Medical Writer30 Dec 2008 12:01 AM
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SYDNEY, Dec 30 AAP - An Australian scientist is part of an international team which has made a breakthrough in polymer technology that promises to both speed-up drug testing and also create new slow-release medicines.
Dr Michael Stockenhuber, based at the University of Newcastle, and colleagues have for the first time described how tiny molecules and a type synthetic polymer can be made to "bind" seamlessly together.
The discovery has application for the drug testing of athletes, as a swathe of blood tests could be replaced with a tiny probe stamped with the exact imprints of known drug-related molecules.
"Currently, these things tend to be done with rather complicated procedures. You have to go through a lot of machines. But these MIPs (Molecular Imprinted Polymers) have the potential to do this with a single probe," Dr Stockenhuber told AAP.
"It is a bit of a lock and key mechanism. If you have a (drug-related) key in your blood, it falls into the lock.
"You'd have a reading and you'd know almost immediately ... All the other keys that are floating around have no effect."
Dr Stockenhuber said further research was needed but the technology could be rolled out across the world's elite sporting codes within 10 years.
He said MIPS, and their potential, had been on the radar for scientists for some time but it was only now the process of making them was becoming sufficiently refined.
The second major benefit of the research was the potential to lock extremely potent medicines - such as cancer-fighting drugs - within the polymer and then implant this in the body as slow-release method of delivery.
"You take this polymer, which has no problem with rejection, and you put it near the organ where the cancer is and it would slowly release these cancer-fighting drugs over years.
"It's is very selective. Your drug is seeping in (but) nothing else will go in there."
The research has been published in the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Journal of December 2008.
