NEWS IN BRIEF: Radioactive buckyballs

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Chemistry Professor Lon Wilson is exploring the possibility that a buckyball with a radioactive metal deposited in the middle might have a future as a drug delivery system, similar to the radioactive metals doctors currently use in imaging to see tissue and bone inside the body.

Radioactive metals are also used in therapy to kill cancerous cells.

The carbon capsules may have special delivery properties that current ways of delivering radioactive metals do not have. There are hints, Wilson said, that the carbon cages may be able to cross the blood-brain barrier to reach the brain -- an inaccessible region for current systems.

Wilson and graduate students Thomas Thrash and Dawson Cagle presented their findings in a poster, "Preparation and Neutron Activation of Holmium Metallofullerenes," March 24 at the 211th national meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans.

This item appeared in the News section of the March 29, 1996 issue.

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