UT mechanical engineers are using a new material to deliver drugs and medicine into our bodies: silk. 

Mechanical engineering assistant professor Tiger Tao and graduate student Shaoqing Zhang have discovered a new method of drug delivery called transient electronics. Tao said these electronics can be used for biosensing, or receiving immediate feedback on how the body responds to medicine. These electronic devices made of silk proteins can physically disappear into the environment of human bodies, making them biodegradable.

“The device has designed optical features, or ‘diffractive patterns,’ that can be used to monitor (in real time) the degradation and drug release by simply using a laser pointer,” Tao said. 

He added that the electronic devices are composed of silk polymers, or chemical building blocks, as well as the drug itself.

Tao said silk is suitable for new forms of drug delivery because it is a bio-synthetic polymer that is low-cost, environmentally-friendly and can be mass-produced.

“We are developing a set of biomanufacturing processes which will allow us, and peer researchers, to work with those protein materials in a high-precision and large-scale fashion,” Tao said.

“The focus of the research was geared towards finding whether the silk device would dissolve in a certain period of time while in the human body,” Tao said. He added that studying real-time drug release in the human body is difficult because it requires sophisticated imaging techniques.

The device works, but Tao said it still requires a power source. 

“Now we want to push one step further and develop ‘transient optics,’ which are a group of optical devices that can  degrade in the human bodies,” Tao said. “(Optical devices) have much less constraints in terms of power issues, namely no battery, or much less power, needed for the implanted optical device.”

“However, the team is still looking for a material better suited for drug delivery than silk, including potentially synthetic materials, for other biomedical applications, such as tissue engineering,” Tao said. “We are currently developing a set of protein-based biomaterials, including both naturally extracted and genetically engineered ones, which provide better biocompatibility, better mechanical properties and, more importantly, are easy to functionalize.”