From Reader Elvin:

Harvard Researchers Develop New System for Producing Stable, Amorphous Nanoparticles from Wide Material Range

Before Ibuprofen can relieve your headache, it has to dissolve in your bloodstream. The problem is Ibuprofen, in its native form, isn’t particularly soluble. Its rigid, crystalline structures — the molecules are lined up like soldiers at roll call — make it hard to dissolve in the bloodstream. To overcome this, manufacturers use chemical additives to increase the solubility of Ibuprofen and many other drugs, but those additives also increase cost and complexity.

David A. Weitz, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Applied Physics (Photo by Eliza Grinnell, Harvard SEAS.)

The key to making drugs by themselves more soluble is not to give the molecular soldiers time to fall in to their crystalline structures, making the particle unstructured or amorphous.

Researchers from Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) have developed a new system that can produce stable, amorphous nanoparticles in large quantities that dissolve quickly.

But that’s not all. The system is so effective that it can produce amorphous nanoparticles from a wide range of materials, including for the first time, inorganic materials with a high propensity towards crystallization, such as table salt.

These unstructured, inorganic nanoparticles have different electronic, magnetic and optical properties from their crystalized counterparts, which could lead to applications in fields ranging from materials engineering to optics.

David A. Weitz, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Applied Physics and an associate faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, describes the research in a paper published today in Science.

“This is a surprisingly simple way to make amorphous nanoparticles from almost any material,” said Weitz. “It should allow us to quickly and easily explore the properties of these materials. In addition, it may provide a simple means to make many drugs much more useable.”