Expert interview

Last week we had the chance to talk to Prof. Dr. Rudolf, who is a teacher for biotechnology at our university. He is an expert at the field of biosensors and therefore a good interview partner for our project. During the interview we got some deeper insights on the following topics: 

Detection of medicine concentration in the blood

Since we are aiming for a mainly non-invasive monitoring method, Dr. Rudolf suggested to take a deeper look at optical methods for the detection of the medicine concentration e.g. fluoroscopy or Raman-spectroscopy. However, he was not sure if this could work out or not, since the concentration of medicine in the blood might be too low to be recognized by optical methods and the signal is moreover reduced while passing through the skin. To get some more insights on optical methods he also recommended us some colleagues, who a specialized on that topic and could be helpful for our research.

Transdermal application

First, we presented Prof. Rudolf our current idea to use AI to search for new antibiotics that have a small enough molecule structure to be able to go through the skin. We got positive feedback on that and he thinks this could be a possible solution. But he moreover had some additional ideas. We could use called carrier systems or nano formulations that would carry the antibiotics through the skin. For this he suggested liposomes. Liposomes are small vesicles filled with liquid, whose shell consists of a lipid bilayer, like a cell membrane. Their molecule membrane has an amphiphilic character of the membrane which means they have a hydrophilic head and a hydrophobic tail. The purely optically similar micelles have only a single lipid layer. Liposomes are already used in medicine to transport drugs.

For the application itself he had some comments as well. Since every person has differences in his anatomy, it might not be useful to have the drug application only on one fixed spot on the body. He suggested to use a searching system, that would use for example optical sensors to search for the blood vessel that is closes to the surface and do the drug application on that exact spot. Due to this the drug could be absorbed most efficient and we could save medication. For this we would need flexible microchannels so that the application spot of the drugs is flexible for every patient and could even be changed during the application.

As you can see me made some big steps in specifying our concept and we again want to thank Prof. Rudolf a lot more his time and ideas. It really helped us a lot.