Remote Controlled Delivery Systems. On a Road to Medical Applications

Today, the world moves towards wireless communication. Broadly, so far it is all about communication between something of the size one can keep in hand like mobile phone. Current trend in miniaturizing the device capable to remote control and communication requires new solution in physics, chemistry and engineering. There is a growing demand to make microstructures enabling remote communication. Physics offers various remote signalling such as ultrasound, magnetic field, light and electromagnetic irradiation of wide spectrum including radio waves. Obviously, the fabricated microstructures should be susceptible to ones or few of these remote physical signalling. Modern approaches in Materials Science offers some solutions where micron and submicron structures could have multimodal function and could be guided and interrogated by external device. Looking from medical perspectives, the number of unmet needs in biomedicine require local solution, namely local treatment of diseases where the externally guided vehicles are unable to reach the side of interest, explore it via sensing principle interrogate with external device and deploy of therapeutic drugs. The challenge is whether we can label single cell in organism and follow their movement or have handful number of vehicle with encapsulated cargo circulating in the body but retained via remote controlled. The task for materials science in this aspect is to fabricate a vehicle carrying therapeutic, made of materials approved for human use and contain elements susceptible for remote control. In our work we review the most recent approaches to explore delivery systems enabling remote guidance. Our focus is in particular on layer-by-layer capsules which have been introduced as technology to tailor various function in one entity. Apart of layer-by-layer method we are going to consider so called polymer microchambers technique and formation of capsules exploring pattern surfaces as well as use porous vaterite particles where the therapeutic effect is reached by ultrasound, for example.