Desai paper

This paper was about the effect that the shape of a drug can have on its ability to deliver its 'payload' to its target. In this case, they were looking specifically at cell adhesion rates (and the effects of that adhesion on cell monolayer integrity) between a few different chemicals: tomato lectin polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) microspheres versus flat microdevices and regular old PMMA MS's versus MD's. The idea was that a sphere is going to have a lot of unused surface area, so the flat microdevices should be a more efficient way of delivering the drug. The tomato lectin was there to target the PMMA to the cells (free TL had been shown to do this, previously). So this idea is pretty logical, and the effects were pretty much what you'd expect.

I thought it was interesting that geometry had such a strong effect on adhesion, and therefore on drug delivery. It's an insightful concept, and it makes sense. I thought the sustained adhesion was particularly telling: the TL-PMMA microdevices showed a constant %-bound over two consecutive washes, whereas the TL-PMMA microspheres showed a fairly steep linear decline.

Cool stuff. Underscores the importance of intelligent drug design, rather than just saturation bombing and hoping for the best.