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To: elpolvo who wrote (17718)	4/22/2003 8:01:07 AM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Fuller Up......... April 17, 2003, 10:41PM New way to battle anthrax Rice researchers study buckyballs By ERIC BERGER Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle Science Writer Buckyballs may become the newest enlistee in the war against terror. Researchers at Rice University are studying the use of buckyballs, a man-made, spherical form of carbon discovered 18 years ago, to transport critical drugs directly to diseases such as anthrax. Most medicines pass through the entire body when ingested, forcing doctors to give higher doses of a drug and pay extra attention to a treatment's health effects on all organs. When ingested, Cipro lingers in the body and may or may not be concentrated enough to eradicate anthrax. What buckyballs -- about the size of an antibiotic molecule -- bring to the treatment regimen is a malleable structure that scientists can attach things to, a guided missile of sorts. Researchers are working to attach Cipro, vancomycin and other antibiotics to a buckyball along with another molecule that would steer the package toward anthrax spores. This would allow a much more concentrated, potent dose of antibiotics to battle the disease. "Buckyballs provide a beautiful scaffolding," said Lon Wilson, a Rice chemistry professor. This concept of targeting antibiotics is novel, and has not yet delivered a finished product. Wilson and colleagues at Rice and the Texas Medical Center are still working to identify the best chemical to allow buckyballs to target anthrax, but the U.S. government appears eager to support the work, he says. It has not been an easy road to commercial success for the buckyball, so named because its structure resembles the geodesic dome invented by Richard Buckminster Fuller. Prior to the buckyball, carbon was known in only two forms, graphite and diamond. Its discovery may have won Rice chemists Rick Smalley and Robert Curl, along with Sir Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex, Great Britain, the Nobel Prize, but the buckyball has found no commercial application despite its unique properties. Although the buckyball was a progenitor of the now booming science of nanotechnology, it was nonetheless soon dismissed by many scientists as a novelty. A later discovery of carbon nanotubes, a stretched out form of buckyballs, has proved much more marketable. But recently, said Houston nanotechnolgy promoter Conrad Masterson, things are looking up for the buckyball, especially its uses in medicine, including transporting drugs. "I get the sense that there are a lot of people looking at this mechanism," he said. If buckyballs do find their way to commercial success, the cost to make them -- once a barrier -- will no longer exist. Industry experts say bulk manufacturing techniques now exist to make an ounce of buckyballs for $5, far less than the $10,000 a pound in the past decade.