Scientists of Ural Federal University receive grants from Russian Science Foundation

The Russian Science Foundation supported 14 young scientists and six scientific groups or Ural Federal University (Ekaterinburg, Russia) according to the results of the 2019 competition. The support was given to the projects on such topics as migration of Russian scientists, demographic processes modeling, piezoelectric properties effect in nano-scale materials, mathematical modeling of structural phase changes, cooperation between Russia and post-soviet countries of Central Asia.

One of the scientific groups will be working on the creation of a super-prolonged medication delivery system.

“I will be developing a hybrid system consisting of inorganic component tied with a drug and able to release it while self-destroying and removing itself from the body”, says Kirill Grzhegorzhevsky, researcher at the Department of Chemical Materials Engineering of the Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, UrFU. “The second part of the system is the organic component, which ensures that everything is secured in a single framework or matrix”.

The idea of the project is to create a universal system that can be flexibly tuned for various medications. At that, the system will be of super-prolonged action.

If everything works out, it will be a system that releases very little amount of medication in a very long period of time. This works, for example, for hormones and immunosuppressors, i.e. something that should be delivered into the body in very low amounts but during a very long time”, says Kirill. “The system is supposed to be put into a biocompatible capsule, which is then implanted under the skin and releases the medication very slowly due to the inorganic component. The latter holds the medication near the indicator molecule. As long as the inorganic component is there, it doesn’t emit light, and as soon as the component goes away, the indicator turns on, and the medication is released”.

The grants were also given to the scientists of UrFU’s Graduate School of Economics and Management, Institute of Public Administration and Entrepreneurship, Institute of Physics and Technology, Institute of Chemical Engineering, and Ural Institute of Humanities.

###