Small materials yield big innovations
Wubin Bai's lab develops next-generation medical devices like wearable wireless patches for health monitoring and drug delivery.
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.”
Bai’s skin patch can measure blood oxygen levels, heart rate, respiration and blood pressure. (Alyssa LaFaro/UNC Research)
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.
Bai’s lab has also created wireless, wearable patch for deep tissue monitoring that allows doctors to track vitals in real-time and improves comfort in patients. Current deep tissue monitors often require implantation using ultrasound technology.
“We could put it near the neck to monitor coughing and swelling in the throat without any painful intubation measures,” he says.
Accessing hard-to-reach places
Bai and his collaborators in biology, biomedical engineering and chemistry are also developing technology for use inside the body: robots that mimic human skin.
This e-skin uses silver nanowires and conductive polymers to sense its surroundings and adapt as needed. It can mold to the organs it’s treating, administer treatments like electrical signals, and measure blood pressure, bladder volume and more.
E-skin could be a game-changer for risky procedures. That’s why Bai is also collaborating with Carolina geneticist Jason Stein, who creates 3D cell structures in petri dishes — called organoids — that use a patient’s real brain cells to test drugs on to determine best treatments for brain diseases.
Some of Bai’s tiny devices: a wearable patch to map skin mechanics (upper left), a series of multimodal transistors using two-dimensional materials (center) and an array of microelectrodes to record activities from brain organoids. (Alyssa LaFaro/UNC Research)
Training the next generation
In his three years at UNC-Chapel Hill, Bai has built a large cohort of young researchers. He is mentoring more than 30 of them, from high school students to postdoctoral researchers.
“They often bring up ideas and thoughts that are not influenced or molded by previous research in this field,” he says. “Those refreshing, sometimes out-of-box, thoughts could draw exciting innovations in our research.”
Both Bai and his students are motivated by the pace at which these projects move. Creating powerful medical tools with small, accessible devices drives the production process.
“Our research connects with broad communities and can be translated into the real world,” Bai says. “That motivates us to constantly provide new visions, ideas and concepts to further revolutionize medical technologies and improve health care.”
