Can nanofibre save your life?

Researchers in professor Margaret Frey's lab  at Cornell create fibre hundreds of times thinner than a human hair that can capture toxic chemicals and pathogens. The fibers have been designed and combined to prevent the spread of agricultural chemicals and to capture toxic substances in liquids.

Tiny, complex devices traditionally are made in high-tech clean rooms using expensive equipment and costly material, like gold. Frey and her colleagues are replacing that cost by making the devices with nanofibres from plastics, outside the clean room, using an inexpensive, scalable process - electrospinning.

Using nanofibres, processes done in a medical testing lab – for example, purifying samples, mixing ingredients, capturing bacteria – can be done with material about the size of a deck of cards. The fibres are a fast, easy and inexpensive way to concentrate on E. coli, cholera toxin or carcinogens and to improve accuracy of detection. Eventually, these fibres will be part of devices as inexpensive and easy to use as home pregnancy tests and will diagnose diseases without requiring specialised laboratories – particularly useful in regions with limited access to doctors and hospitals.

To prevent pesticides from harming the environment, Frey and her students have encapsulated pesticides into biodegradable nanofibres. This keeps them intact until needed or makes sure they do not wash away from the plants they protect. The delivery system is created by electrospinning solutions of cellulose, the pesticide and polylactic acid – a polymer derived from corn.

The materials are biodegradable and derived from renewable resources. ''The chemical is protected, so it won't degrade from being exposed to air and water,'' Frey says, explaining that this keeps the chemical where it needs to be and allows it to time-release. ''By allowing rapid detection of disease and preventing agricultural chemical release into the environment, these nanofibers just might save a life,'' she said.