Building nanoglands

Several medical researchers have been working to engineer nanoglands, which closely mimic the body's natural response in healing processes, for the personalized treatment of many diseases. One of the teams led by Mauro Ferrari at the University of California at Berkeley have developed methods for fabricating mechanically robust devices with hundreds of thousands of densely packed nanochannels with precisely controlled size and surface properties. Another group of Albert van der Berg and his collaborators at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have demonstrated that a time-variable rate of release can be achieved through electrokinetic phenomena occurring when an electrical potential is applied between the inlet and outlet of channels. Our group has developed implantable nanochannel membranes with electrodes near the membrane inlet and outlet, and has reproducibly demonstrated the delivery of molecules proportional to the applied electrical field up to ten times higher than the passive delivery.