MIT Develops Ingestible Medical Devices that Can Be Broken down with Light

Varieties

January 28th, 6:46am

Cairo - Hazem Bader

Students walk past the ‘Great Dome’ atop Building 10 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, Mass., April 3, 2017. (AP)

There are an increasing number of medical devices that treat us by going in through the mouth like bariatric balloons or esophageal stents, but the process of getting them out again can be a lot more painful than putting them in. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have addressed this problem by offering an alternative: devices that can break down in your stomach after swallowing a pill of light. The new medical devices are made from a light-sensitive hydrogel that need a trigger to break down, and the light pill accomplishes this role. This means the devices could start to break down once they come into contact with certain kinds of light, and would then be processed through the body like any other kind of waste. According to the findings published in the Science Advances journal, experiments on pigs showed that a bariatric balloon could be dissolved in as little as 30 minutes using the new light pill. In a report published on Sunday by the Science Alert website, senior author Giovanni Traverso explained: "The new devices are made from a light-sensitive polymer that includes a chemical bond that breaks when exposed to certain wavelengths of light. That was linked with stronger materials including polyacrylamide. The end result is something that's durable enough to last in the gut and yet still break down when exposed to light." By changing the mix of the hydrogel material, the researchers are able to vary the time it takes to break down, noted Traverso. Mechanical Engineer Ritu Raman from MIT said: "We're forming one polymer network and then forming another polymer network around it, so it's really entangled, but the blue light will suffice to destroy it." Different colors of light affect the degradation speed as well. Ultraviolet light works faster than blue light, for example, but also carries a higher risk of causing damage to the cells in the body. This what led researchers to choose the blue light, said Raman.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://aawsat.com/english/home/article/2102831/mit-develops-ingestible-medical-devices-can-be-broken-down-light