Shape-shifting molecules may provide new diagnosis methods

Shape-shifting molecules may provide new methods for drug delivery, sensing and medical diagnosis

November 10, 2014

A new University of Canterbury research project is investigating the impact of large molecular cages trapping small molecules within them to help improve drug delivery methods and medical diagnoses.

Professor Paul Kruger heads a chemistry research group at the University Canterbury which has received $750,000 of Marsden funding to see if altering molecules can help produce better drug delivery agents or compounds for magnetic resonance imaging used in medical diagnosis. The university this week awarded $4.4 million in Marsden funding for a variety of research projects.

``Synthetic chemists have the ability to make molecular cages of any size and can adapt them to capture molecules of many shapes and sizes,” Professor Kruger says.

``We will develop functional, responsive and adaptable molecular cages able to reversibly switch their properties and behaviour through light irradiation or by changing temperature. Light and heat are then the keys that open and shut the cages.

``These Trojan horse complexes would be capable of controllably releasing their contents via an external stimulus and would represent a great advance towards the development of novel drug delivery agents. Such novel agents could reduce the harmful side-effects that result from the indiscriminate delivery of drug molecules to sites within the body not associated with disease.

``The cage molecules might also be modified so that they behave as sensors; detecting the presence of harmful environmental pollutants such as anions when trapping them inside. Anions, such as phosphate and nitrate, are found in fertilisers and are detrimental to waterways when present in an overabundance and can cause damage to river and lake quality as a result of run-off from dairy farms.

``Access to molecules capable of selectively and specifically sensing these ions may lead to the development of test kits for on-site real-time analysis.”

Using switchable magnetic metal ions in the synthesis of these cage molecules will allow Professor Kruger’s group to realise light driven on-off switchable magnetic resonance contrast agents. Current state-of-the-art magnetic resonance contrast agents use expensive and toxic metal ions that cannot be switched off.

The realisation of dynamic systems as proposed by Professor Kruger will represent a great advance in the development of magnetic resonance contrast agents, materials that occupy a significant portion of a growing global imaging health-care market worth $US$6 billion a year.

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