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A new drug delivery device using cylindrical block copolymer nanochannels was successfully developed for controlled protein drug delivery applications. Depending on the hydrodynamic diameter of the protein drugs, the pore size in cylindrical nanochannels could be controlled precisely down to 6 nm by Au deposition. Zero-order release of bovine serum albumin (BSA) and human growth hormone (hGH) by single-file diffusion, which has been observed for gas diffusion through zeolite pores, was realized up to 2 months without protein denaturation. Furthermore, a nearly constant in vivo release of hGH from the drug delivery nanodevice implanted to Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats was continued up to 3 weeks, demonstrating the feasibility for long-term controlled delivery of therapeutic protein drugs.

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Designing softness into robots holds great potential for augmenting robotic compliance in dynamic, unstructured environments. However, despite the body's softness, existing models mostly carry inherent hardness in their driving parts, such as pressure-regulating components and rigid circuit boards. This compliance gap can frequently interfere with the robot motion and makes soft robotic design dependent on rigid assembly of each robot component. We present a skin-like electronic system that enables a class of wirelessly activated fully soft robots whose driving part can be softly, compactly, and reversibly assembled. The proposed system consists of two-part electronic skins (e-skins) that are designed to perform wireless communication of the robot control signal, namely, "wireless inter-skin communication," for untethered, reversible assembly of driving capability. The physical design of each e-skin features minimized inherent hardness in terms of thickness (<1 millimeter), weight (~0.8 gram), and fragmented circuit configuration. The developed e-skin pair can be softly integrated into separate soft body frames (robot and human), wirelessly interact with each other, and then activate and control the robot. The e-skin-integrated robotic design is highly compact and shows that the embedded e-skin can equally share the fine soft motions of the robot frame. Our results also highlight the effectiveness of the wireless interskin communication in providing universality for robotic actuation based on reversible assembly.

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A novel target specific small interfering RNA (siRNA) delivery system was successfully developed using polyethyleneimine (PEI)-hyaluronic acid (HA) conjugate. Anti-PGL3-Luc siRNA was used as a model system suppressing the PGL3-Luc gene expression. The siRNA/PEI-HA complex with an average size of ca. 21 nm appeared to be formed by electrostatic interaction between the negatively charged siRNA and the positively charged PEI of PEI-HA conjugate. The cytotoxicity of siRNA/PEI-HA complex to B16F1 cells was lower than that of siRNA/PEI complex according to the MTT assay. When B16F1 and HEK-293 cells were treated with fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) labeled siRNA/PEI-HA complex, B16F1 cells, with a lymphatic vessel endothelial hyaluronan receptor-1 (LYVE-1), showed higher green fluorescent intensity than HEK-293 cells because of the HA receptor mediated endocytosis of the complex. Accordingly, the PGL3-Luc gene silencing of anti-PGL3-Luc siRNA/PEI-HA complex was more efficient in B16F1 cells than in HEK-293 cells. In addition, the inhibited PGL3-Luc gene silencing effect in the presence of free HA in the transfection medium revealed that siRNA/HA-PEI complex was selectively taken up to B16F1 cells via HA receptor mediated endocytosis. All these results demonstrated that the intracellular delivery of anti-PGL3-Luc siRNA/PEI-HA complex could be facilitated by the HA receptor mediated endocytosis.

In this report, we describe the structure of a robust and highly conductive 3D graphene oxide hydrogel. The reduced graphene oxide hydrogel or rGH is fabricated by a crosslinking reaction with ethylene diamine followed by a hydrazine reduction. The material showed a high electrical conductivity of 1351 S m À1 and a specific surface area of 745 m 2 g À1 with 10.3 MPa break strength. When used as electrodes for a supercapacitor, it showed a high specific capacitance of 232 F g À1 .