Its hard to get meds to the lungs: Breathable algae offers a new path

If we want to get something inside the lungs, like medicine to treat a disease like bacterial pneumonia, it has to be small enough to actually reach the lungs and sneaky enough not to be detected and eaten once there. It's like breaking into a heavily-defended vault.

UC San Diego chemical and nano engineering researchers have cracked the code to get into the vault directly. They designed tiny drug-delivering vehicles that can dodge all the defenses and dive deep inside the lungs.

Researchers have figured out that algae would be the microrobotic vehicles to carry their desired lung medications, they faced another challenge: how to get the microrobots into the lungs. In their latest study, published in Nature Communications, the researchers found that if they picked a small enough algae species, they could put the microrobots into aerosols.

Next, the microrobots encounter the invader-detecting macrophages. While the research team picked algae that can be fast enough to "swim" away from the macrophages, they also armed them with a tool to pass under the radar: it basically works like an invisibility cloak. Researchers gave the packets a coating – the membrane of a cell that's normally found in the body, like a platelet.

Image source: Joseph Wang & Liangfang Zhang Labs.