By Ryu Jin
Staff Reporter
A South Korean research team has succeeded in producing a vacant nano capsule that can be used for both diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer through an innovative form of heat treatment.
Seoul National University (SNU) Prof. Hyun Taek-hwan said Sunday that his team has developed the process, which can enhance the structure and properties of nano materials drastically through heat treatment.
Hyun, a 43-year-old bio-chemical engineering professor, introduced the new method, which other scientists say made a significant breakthrough in the heat treatment of nano materials, in a U.S.-based international science journal Nature Materials.
In what it called the ``wrap-bake-peel process,’’ the SNU team wrapped the surface of nano particles with silica, baked them at a high temperature of over 500 degrees Celsius and then peeled off the silicon dioxide that wrapped the nano materials.
Heat treatment is a method widely used to improve or alter the physical ― sometimes chemical ― properties of a material. But it could not be used for nano materials easily, as they lost their peculiar properties after the treatment.
Hyun’s team applied this technology to oxidized steel (akagenite, β-FeOOH), a nano material that can be produced in large volumes, to make a hollowed nano capsule.
It is a technology that can be used both in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, according to his team: while the capsule itself can be used as a contrast medium for MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), it can also contain medicine.
Hyun’s team said that it has also succeeded in altering a mixture of the nano material of iron and platinum (Fe-Pt mixture) into an fct FePt nanoparticle alloy, which has recently gained popularity as the next-generation magnetic-recording media.
``I hope that we can make nano materials with various functions while maintaining the nano structures through the wrap-bake-peel process,’’ Hyun said.
In late 2004, Hyun developed a cheap way to mass produce uniform nanoparticles and presented it to Nature Material, a monthly multi-disciplinary journal aimed at bringing together cutting-edge research across the entire spectrum of materials science.
Nanoparticles are the basic element for MRI visualization, next-generation high-capacity storage devices, nano electrical devices, next-generation fluorescent displays and other various fields of nano-technology to be commercialized.
However, production in uniform size was crucial for it to be applied in various fields because the property of the nano particle is determined by its size.