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Don Ingber, MD, PhD, of Children's Hospital Boston's Vascular Biology program, has long espoused the idea that cells have mechanical properties that govern their form and function. Now, he shows that magnets can influence these properties and thereby control the activities of living cells—a technology that could lead to finely tuned, noninvasive medical treatments.
Ingber, with colleagues Robert Mannix, PhD, Sanjay Kumar, MD, PhD, and physicists at Harvard University, coated cell receptors with tiny beads measuring just 30 nanometers in diameter (about 1/100,000 the diameter of a human hair). When exposed to a magnetic field, the beads themselves became magnets and pulled together through magnetic attraction, pulling the receptors into clusters. This clustering mimicked what happens when drugs bind to the receptors, and triggered the same biochemical responses. But unlike drugs, magnets can switch on and off quickly, and can be controlled by external instruments and computers.
Diabetics, for example, could have insulin-producing cells coated with nanobeads implanted under the skin. When blood sugar shoots up, a magnet worn on the skin would switch on insulin production—no need for repeated injections. Instead of pacemakers, heart patients could get an injection of nanobeads, activated by magnetic stimulation when heart rhythms falter. And the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which supported the work, envisions magnets that spark production of an antidote or antibiotic when toxins or pathogens are detected nearby.
"Living cells are beginning to be integrated as components in medical micro-devices," notes Ingber. "But there need to be ways to interface them, so you can control them from the outside. Magnetics provide a way to do that."
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