Editorial pubs.acs.org/cm
Solving Drug Delivery by Drawing from Two Different Fields: Materials Chemistry and Pharmacy Chemistry of Materials’ 1k Club: Maria Vallet-Regi
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CM: At what stage of your academic career were you when you submitted this article to Chemistry of Materials? Who were the other three authors on the paper, and at what stage were they? Where are they now? MVR: I had recently initiated a new line of research on biomaterials. At that moment, I had just become full professor at a college of pharmacy; my background and origins were at the college of chemistry, where the aims and interests of the student body were dissimilar. Therefore, I worked on reorienting my previous knowledge and finding areas where I could contribute to the pharmaceutical field. My previous work was focused on materials and the science of the solid state, dealing mainly with magnetic and superconducting materials. I was particularly focused on the synthesis of materials following various methods, such as wet routes, to try to obtain materials with small and homogeneous particle sizes. I was well versed on mesoporous materials and their applications in catalysis. When I took my first steps in the world of biomaterials, I thought that the mesopores of these materials could perhaps harbor pharmaceutical drugs for a subsequent release, that they could act, so to say, as a load container carrying drugs to be released where and when needed. This idea triggered this particular piece of work, which we published in Chemistry of Materials. It confirmed for the first time the feasibility of such an idea, although we had to keep working for many years to reach the conditions that we desired for such a drug carrier, i.e., a smart device that holds its payload until a certain signal triggers its release. The other authors were Joaquiń Pérez Pariente, an expert in catalysis who was working part-time with my group, and two postdoctoral students, Rafael Pérez del Real (a physicist) and Ainhoa Rámila (a chemist). Currently, Joaquiń and Rafael hold permanent positions at CSIC, while Ainhoa did not pursue a career in research. CM: Given the high citation record of this article, a significant amount of research has been impacted by your findings over the years. Where did you think the field was headed when you wrote this article? In your opinion, how has this particular research field evolved ever since? MVR: Undoubtedly, it opened up a new line of research. We were dealing with well-known materials in the field of catalysis, but this article suggested a new application for them, that being drug release. Shortly after the publication of this article I considered that, given the similarityboth in terms of composition and presence of hydroxyl surface groups between mesoporous materials and bioactive glasses, which were also part of our ongoing research, mesoporous materials could perhaps be also useful in bone regeneration; we also confirmed this hypothesis.
ontinuing our series, called the 1k Club, we interview the authors of those papers published in Chemistry of Materials that have been cited 1000 times or more. In 2001, Maria Vallet-Regi (shown in Figure 1) and her team published
Figure 1. Chemistry of Materials’ 1k Club Member, Maria Vallet-Regi.
an extremely influential paper that was the first to show that mesoporous MCM materials could be used as a drug delivery vehicle. The work, entitled “A New Property of MCM-41: Drug Delivery System”, demonstrated charging and release of ibuprofen, a commonly used anti-inflammatory drug.1 The paper has been cited 1,011 times in Web of Science and 1,301 times in Google Scholar.2 Indeed, as testament to the singularity of this paper with respect to the application of mesoporous MCM materials for drug delivery, a 2015 review in Accounts of Chemical Research on the engineering of hybrid nanoparticles for therapeutics and diagnostics cites Vallet-Regi’s paper as the first demonstration of mesoporous silica nanoparticles for drug delivery.3 The motivation behind attempting this work is interesting and gets to the heart of the importance of multidisciplinary science as a source of creativity and ideas. We (CM, Chemistry of Materials) caught up with Maria Vallet-Regi (MVR) to ask her a few questions about this important piece of work. © 2016 American Chemical Society
Published: March 8, 2016 1245
DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.6b00757 Chem. Mater. 2016, 28, 1245−1246
Chemistry of Materials
Editorial
Currently, more than 5,500 articles support the claim of widespread interest of these two concepts combined, drug release and bone regeneration. Thanks to the combination of these two concepts, I have been referred to, by the scientific community, as a pioneer in the field of ceramic mesoporous materials with applications in biomedicine, an honor for which I am extremely grateful. Our work showed for the first time the potential biomedical applications of these materials in the fields of bone regeneration and controlled drug release and started a new line of research. CM: If you had to put your finger on it, what made your paper special? What are you most happy about when you reread this article? MVR: Certainly, I would say that it is the idea of loading and releasing drugs in and from mesoporous materials. In other words, I was most happy to consider a new application that has proved its usefulness over time. CM: What’s your advice to young scientists trying to discover the next breakthrough in material science? MVR: I always say that it is very effective to consider a problem from the opposite side, or to think “outside the box”, let us say. When I tackled this work, I did it from the point of view of a materials scientist, using my tools as a materials scientist to do it. It was self-evident for me, but if I had looked at it from a more focused and particular way, with specific goals in mind, perhaps it would not have been so clear. This is why I constantly encourage people to “look outside through the window”, and to work with experts in very different fields. A multidisciplinary approach is extremely rich, and it should be encouraged.
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Carlos Toro, Managing Editor Jillian M. Buriak, Editor-in-Chief
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) Vallet-Regi, M.; Ramila, A.; del Real, R. P.; Perez-Pariente, J. A New Property of MCM-41: Drug Delivery System. Chem. Mater. 2001, 13, 308−311. (2) Citations as of February 22, 2016. (3) Nguyen, N. T.; Zhao, N. Engineered Hybrid Nanoparticles for On-Demand Diagnostics and Therapeutics. Acc. Chem. Res. 2015, 48, 3016−3025.
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.6b00757 Chem. Mater. 2016, 28, 1245−1246
