To create brand-new drugs, pharmaceutical researchers have turned to levitating them with blasts of ultrasonic sound.
By Dave Mosher Posted 09.14.2012 at 3:23 pm 9 Comments

Levitating Drugs Dan Harris

Good drugs dissolve easily in the body. Bad pharmaceutical molecules, meanwhile, lock themselves into hard-to-absorb crystals that require strong doses to work, and this overcompensation often leads to crummy side effects.

Unfortunately, the very lab equipment that pharmaceutical researchers use to create new crystal-free drugs can cause the molecules to crystallize.

To get around this conundrum, science wizards at Argonne National Laboratory, a government-run facility southwest of Chicago, counteract gravity with two opposing speakers. Each speaker pumps out sound at 22,000 hertz--just beyond the upper range of human hearing--and form a standing sound wave that can trap blobs of dissolved experimental compounds.

The technique isn’t a way to mass-manufacture new drugs, at least yet. But the stuff floating in the video above can be moved in the X-ray beamline of Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source for detailed chemical analysis--and that might lift promising new drugs into the clinical trial pipeline faster.

9 Comments

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quasi44
09/14/12 at 8:36 pm

Here I thought this was rudimentary in almost all research fields now. Unbelievable. So the wizards know we can manipulate or quantify materials through ultrasonics, ala my parts washer or my wifes' ultrasound tests, and no one thought to reverse the concept? Geez. Ok. Here we go again. Can we use ultrasonics to process nuclear waste and bind the small remaining parts more effectively? Can we make coal plant filtration and sequestering more effective? Separation for creating biofuel esters? Or are the wizards just gonna drop a liquid into a liquid for a few years? The wizards might see Big Pharma, but I see much more. An 'armored' plastic car. Intervention of cancer at mitosis. Fire suppression. Bacteria and virus free cash. Cybersecurity for important systems. Maybe even aligned high speed jets of carbon for the space elevator.

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delkomaticreturns
09/14/12 at 8:53 pm

I just love that most the stuff we are figuring out with "science" nature has been doing for millions and billions and trillions of years with out much effort.

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quasi44
09/14/12 at 9:05 pm

Ultrasonics could give graphene an artificial band gap. Or they can interrupt flow to any other semiconductor. Just because it makes no apparent sound due to overall lack of atmo doesn't mean there's no original force there. Better tires for my truck. Removal of base compounds from materials prior to refinement, ala Gold, 100%. You'd all be amazed at how many structural steel failures are due to impurities in the metal more than age related metal fatigue. Kill hoof rot in farm animals by walking through a washer once or twice a day. Cleaner gas. Glass separation by type prior to recycling. Carbon free crystals. Heat exchangers. Recycling of the problematic dip compounds in electric motors.

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EnDeR Wiggin
09/15/12 at 1:12 am

When i first read this article i was trying to think of ways that levitating medicine would be use full. I thought maybe we could make the medicine levitate within the body to be able to target specific areas and not hurt the rest of the body. Some thing like chemotherapy maybe. Just a though.

"Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever." -Aristophanes

"Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor." -NA

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quasi44
09/15/12 at 5:53 pm

@ Ender; The problem with magnetic fields in the body is that they will always run risk of electrical current problems in our systems.

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quasi44
09/15/12 at 5:54 pm

Not to mention plain old metals attraction-repulsion.

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Stellarman
09/15/12 at 9:24 pm

My sonic screwdriver is on the way

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Peter10
09/30/12 at 9:27 pm

Levitate????



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