Medical device made of mucus delivers drugs

What is it about?

Drugs are often much more effective when delivered from inside the body, slowly diffusing out from an implant. For instance, hip implants can release antibiotics to prevent infections, or gels loaded with anticancer drugs can be injected to kill tumors more efficiently. But designing materials that slowly release drugs can be challenging. A solution is to look towards nature. Polymers found in animals and plants are have plenty of interesting functionalities and are often well accepted by the body when implanted. Mucins are polymers that composes our mucus, the slimy gel that covers our eyes, nose, lungs, stomach, intestines, and the female reproductive tract. The mucus gel protects us from harmful particles, bacteria and viruses, by binding to them before they have a chance to enter the body. This sticky property is what we exploited here. We built a gel made of sticky mucins, loaded drugs inside the gel and measured their release over time. We saw that thanks to mucins’ stickiness, two very different drugs slowly released from the gel. For instance, antibiotics where release so slowly from the mucin gels that bacteria could not grow anywhere near the gel for over a month!

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Why is it important?

Although mucins are highly functional molecules and abundant in nature, they have not been used in many technological applications. This article describes for the first time the assembly of mucins into a stiff hydrogel, and shows that their ability to bind certain molecules can be exploited for biomedical applications. This work should lead to other mucin-based biomaterials.

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