This article was taken from the May 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Physicist Fiorenzo Omenetto is reinventing an old material to deliver drugs on demand, manufacture edible sensors and create flexible electronics. The wonder material? Silk.
Omenetto was first introduced to the potential of silk via David Kaplan, a biomedical engineer. "He gave me this little piece of transparent material -- a silk corneal replacement," says Omenetto, who led the laboratory for Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics and Biophotonics at Tufts University at the time. "We put a laser on it and saw how the beam disappeared and was not scattering on the surface. It was amazing. So we started coming up with other applications." Silk is optically transparent, compatible with the human body and can be re-engineered as a fibre, a liquid, a gel or a solid. "It can assume many of the forms used in technology," he says.
Omenetto’s Silk Lab has developed applications such as edible food packaging, biodegradable silk cups and silk-and-penicillin cards that can be inserted under the skin to provide continuous and controlled delivery of the drug. "We used antennas made of magnesium that you can put inside an animal. When the animal gets an infection, you can wirelessly power them and kill the infections," says Omenetto. "We can use silk as a substrate with materials such as magnesium and gold to generate a set of devices that are edible while being electronically active. This allows for edible RFID technologies that can be interfaced to food."
Some of these technologies have already left the lab. Massachusetts-based startup Vaxess Technologies is using silk to create vaccines that can be stored and shipped without refrigeration. "We’re reinventing silk in formats that are germane to tech applications," says Omenetto. "We’ve started a trend."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
