The greatest medicine ever made would be utterly useless without a way to get it into the human 
body where it can do its job. Traditional drug delivery methods — ingestion and injection — are generally successful, at times inefficient, and definitely not “sexy science.” However, a team of researchers has developed a new, more efficient and effective way to administer medicine that’s much cooler than the old ways of doing things — microcannon drug delivery.
Aside from the fact that cannons are cool, to really understand why we’re so excited about this development, you first need to consider the drawbacks of the two most common ways drugs get into the human body — swallowing and shots.
Swallowing medicine means it has to pass through the digestive system before it can do its job. The delay can extend a patient’s suffering, hinder the drug’s efficacy and cause detrimental side effects. Injections are slightly better, making it possible to put a medicine directly into the bloodstream — so it can get where it’s going more quickly — or at the site of the specific problem. But that type of injection can also affect surrounding, healthy tissue, and it’s very hard to painlessly deliver an injection into deep tissue.
The microcannon could solve all those challenges. In the journal ACS Nano, Joseph Wang and Sadik Esener, nano engineers at the University of California, San Diego, talked about their creation of a microcannon (the barrel is just 5 micrometers long) that uses ultrasound to fire nanobullets (1 micrometer in size) deep into tissue.
Although the microcannon hasn’t yet been used to deliver medicine, it could, in theory, do exactly that once perfected. Because the microcannon fires using ultrasound, drug delivery could be much more accurate and much less invasive than other methods. Imagine the potential this method could have to improve the delivery of chemotherapy drugs that are renowned for adversely affecting healthy tissue while also killing cancer cells.
The microcannon drug delivery system needs further refinement before it can be used to administer medicine, but this is one sexy scientific innovation worth watching. The development of microcannon drug delivery could turn out to be a shot that’s heard ‘round the world!