Nano-needles can force medicine into cells, even when they resist taking it

Physicist Pawel Sikorski and his group are making beds of nails on a miniature scale – a plate covered in nano-needles designed to puncture individual cells.

It sounds a bit painful, but none of these needles will be going directly into your body, because the test subjects are cells under the microscope. Sikorski is working to develop advanced tools for researchers trying to understand what goes on inside the body's cells.

"These nano-needles will make medical research more efficient," he says.

One way to understand how different molecules influence cell function is to deliver the molecules directly into cells and study the effect. Traditionally, research is this field is done by first placing (printing) many different substances on a glass or other surface to study their effect on the cells of interest.

Some of the cells will absorb the medicine, and the researchers can monitor the changes in the cells caused by the different drugs. But in many cases this method does not work very well, because some of the cells don't want to take their medicine. "With the new method, we attach molecules of the drug being tested to the tips of the nano-needles, and then inject it the same way you would with an ordinary medical syringe," says Sikorski.

The researchers create the nano-needles in a small ceramic oven. In goes something that looks like aluminium foil with a small burnt patch on it (which is actually a wafer-thin piece of copper), and two hours later at 500 degrees, the copper reacts with oxygen in the heat, creating copper oxide. The final product looks like grey grass under the microscope, but the grass is actually the nano-needles.