A silica particle that does its job, then disappears: IIT Kanpur's safer way to carry drugs into lungs

Tiny silica particles are excellent couriers — they can carry medicine straight into diseased lungs. The trouble is what they leave behind: silica can trigger the very protein linked to lung scarring. Professor Santosh K. Misra's team at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur has now patented a fix. By baking carbon into the silica as it forms, they created particles that hold a drug load more stably, release it, and then degrade completely — while avoiding the protein that causes the toxic side-effects. The team proved the idea using curcumin as a model cargo, in work published in the journal Nanoscale; the patent runs for 20 years. Animal studies come next, and human trials later — but the principle is elegant: a delivery van that dissolves once the package arrives.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation