Chemotherapy as a treatment for cancer is one of the major medical success stories of the 20th century, but it's far from perfect. Anyone who has been through chemotherapy or who has had a friend or loved one go through it will be familiar with its many side effects: hair loss, nausea, weakened immune system, and even infertility and nerve damage.
Robb's lab, for its part, has created mechanophores that change color when stretched, making them useful for detecting strain in structures, and other mechanophores that can release a smaller molecule, including a drug, in response to a mechanical stimulus. For the new work, they devised a way to use ultrasound waves as that stimulus.
As they began researching the combination of mechanophores and ultrasound, they discovered a problem: Ultrasound could activate the mechanophores, but only at an intensity so strong that it also damaged neighboring tissues. What the researchers needed was a way to focus the energy of the ultrasound right where they wanted it. It turned out that Shapiro's gas vesicle technology provided the solution.
In his previous work, Shapiro made use of the vesicles' tendency to vibrate or"ring" like a bell when bombarded with ultrasound waves. In the current research, however, the vesicles are rung so hard that they break, which focuses the ultrasound energy. The vesicles effectively become tiny bombs whose explosions activate the mechanophore.
Yuxing Yao, a postdoctoral scholar research associate in Shapiro's lab, says this is the first time that focused ultrasound has been able to control a specific chemical reaction in a biological setting.
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