AI to advance nanomedicine manufacturing

The team is using a new $3m grant from the US National Science Foundation, aiming to ‘revolutionise’ how polymer nanoparticles are manufactured.

Polymer nanoparticles have emerged as a powerful tool for delivering medicine to precisely the right place, at the right time, inside the human body, but their use has been limited by the complexity of manufacturing.

“It can take decades for a company to design a molecular recipe and make it consistently reproducible at a large scale,” said Rong Yang, assistant professor in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and lead investigator on the grant.

“There’s a bottleneck going from bench-scale synthesis to industry-scale manufacturing, and that’s what we’re trying to address.”

Yang and collaborators will use AI to analyse and guide the production of polymer nanoparticles in real time.

As nanoparticles are being synthesised with an initiated chemical vapour deposition (iCVD) system, the researchers will incorporate liquid crystals that leave an ‘optical fingerprint’ to be read by computer vision.