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The Exudative maculopathy is a very common eye desease and represents the first cause of loss of sight for people over 50To treat it, until today, it is necessary to have a frequent cycle of injection, an invasive procedure with a high impact on the life of patients, that often abandon their therapy.

To avoid the premature abandonment of the treatment, a group of researchers of the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering "Giulio Natta" of Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with the Deparment of clinical and biomedical sciences "Luigi Sacco, ASST Fatebenefratelli-Sacco, Università degli Studi di Milano, it has developed Mag Shella device that with a singular injection is able to release precise doses of medicine in defined intervals.

The device was first created in 2015 from the Phd thesis of Marco Ferronibiomedical engineer of Politenico di Milano. In six years, thanks to the support of Polihub that has incubated MgShellthe spin off which has gained a lot of prizes and investments the technology and the business model were developed.

MAG SHELL: A NEW THERAPEUTIC FRONTIER FOR EXUDATIVE MACULOPATHY

The Mag Shell ocular device is a drug "container" that is inserted, with a single injection, into the eye and releases the active ingredient gradually, thus ensuring greater patient adherence to the therapeutic protocol.

This operation is possible thanks to the conformation of the device itself, which alternates layers of biodegradable materials, consisting of magnesium or its alloys, with drug doses.

materiali biodegradabili, costituiti da magnesio o da sue leghe, a dosi di farmaco.

"Today this means avoiding that 40% of patients who drop out of therapy go blind, it means drastically reducing the social impact that chronic diseases have" explains Ferroni in an interview.

The advantages of this procedure are many: in addition to the reduction of costs and the impact of current drug treatment on maculopathic patients, hospital staff and on healthcare costs, there are promising possibilities for using MagShell in other areas of pharmaceutical application as well.

The device is currently in a preclinical in vitro trial phase and the first animal pilot study will begin soon.

primo studio pilota su animale.

Cover Photo: Polihub

A research by Politecnico di Milano, published in the journal Aerosol Science and Technology, tries to answer this question by analyzing a series of scenarios characterized by different weather conditions: a city in summer and autumn; a seaside town in summer; a mountain village in summer and winter

Ettore Maggiore, Matteo Tommasini and Paolo M. Ossi published on the magazine Aerosol Science and Technology the article "Propagation in outdoor environments of aerosol droplets produced by breath and light cough.
The research group studied the propagation of the aerosol that we emit from the mouth and nose by breathing, coughing or sneezing in various kinds of open environments.

Virus trasmitted via air such as the flu, the cold, SARS and obviously, Coronavirusdiffuse through areosolwhich is air saturated by water vapor and droplets.
Viruses "ride" the droplets. These evaporate during flight or fall to the ground, depending on their initial size. The evaporation rate depends on the temperature and humidity of the ambient air.
As the drop evaporates and contracts, its speed and flight time in the air flow associated with respiratory activity change.

Up to now, the propagation of aerosol from respiratory activities has been studied experimentally and modeling by considering closed environments and, more recently, environments with complete air conditioning.

In the paper researchers focused on the propagation in open spacesanalyzing breathing and light cough (the one for clearing the throat), normal respiratory activities in healthy or non-symptomatic people, and considering propagation in stagnant air, even if the effect of wind has been discussed.

The propagation distance of droplets have been calculated five environments characterized by different pressure, temperature, relative humidity: a city in summer and autumn; a seaside town in summer; a mountain village in summer and winter.
In every enviromental condition, among the droplets travelling for a longer distance, those emitted by coughing are bigger than the ones emitted breathing.
In the city in summer (high temperature, very high humidity) and in winter in the mountains (low temperature, medium-high humidity) the greatest propagation distances are observed: about 2 m from the mouth. The minimum distances are recorded in summer both in the mountains (high temperature, low humidity) and at the sea (high temperature, medium-high humidity): about 1.5 m from the mouth.

Cover Photo: Matteo Jorjoson on Unsplash