Small materials yield big innovations

Robots that mimic human skin. A wearable patch for wireless drug delivery. A device that can communicate with brain cells in petri dishes.

These futuristic innovations sound like science fiction, but they are the real projects of Wubin Bai. As an assistant professor of applied physical sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill, Bai works with soft and nanomaterials to create next-generation medical devices.

Soft materials are “anything we can deform with our hands,” he says. These include foams, gels, liquids, plastics and biological materials like organs and cells. Nanomaterials are teeny-tiny particles less than 100 nanometers in size. Cell components, DNA and proteins are nanomaterials.

Bai’s lab specializes in combining artificial and biological materials to create new medical devices. He has a background in physics and materials science and works with clinicians, biologists and other scientists to create these innovations.

“I want to understand the challenges that exist in health care and biology,” he says. “These enormous fields are a gold mine for us to explore.”

Improving treatment and patient monitoring
Among Bai’s many projects is a wireless patch that delivers drugs to patients using a smartphone or computer. About the size of a Band-Aid, the patch contains microneedles that deliver medication into the patient on demand.

Bai and his collaborator, pharmacologist Juan Song, believe the patch could administer multiple medications at once, making it useful for diseases like Alzheimer’s and HIV, which require a combination of drugs to treat.

Another is a pulse oximeter that can provide more effective readings for patients of color. Because only a small range of skin tones were considered in the creation of these devices, some readings can be inaccurate.

“So we’re designing a spectrometer that incorporates a broad range of light sources to consider multiple skin tones,” Bai says.

Read the full article about Wubin Bai’s research by Alyssa LaFaro, UNC Research.