Remember surgery on a grape? Now we have elephants in cells!
Seriously, in the future, instead of removing microplastics from tissues, we will use them to 3D print limbs as cells or other things!
References:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13232
Preprint Two-photon 3D printing of functional microstructures inside ...
Seriously, we breath plastics, we drink plastics, we eat plastics. Because it is not enough, authors propose to inject plastics in blood/body for targeted intracellular drug delivery!
In second thought, I don't see the link between plastics polymerization and targeted intracellular drug delivery. Will Plastic polymerization active the drug action at target? What plastic concentration for drug effect? Be the drug inactivated because embedded in the plastic? They microinjected plastics into a cell, meaning high local plastic concentration then turned on the laser. How much plastics do they need to inject in a body to have a sufficient local plastic concentration at the target (and what about the rest of the plastics in all the body)?
Nicolas Barois Hi Nicolas, thank you for raising these important concerns. This research does not advocate for flooding the body with plastics. The study uses biocompatible photoresists, injected into single cells in vitro, and polymerizes them with precise femtosecond lasers to build intracellular structures.
The mention of "targeted drug delivery" is a future potential application, where such 3D-printed scaffolds could serve as nanoscale platforms for carrying or releasing drugs inside specific cells—not because polymerization activates drugs, but because it could allow precise, localized release or manipulation.
Safety, polymer concentration, and biodegradability are open questions that would need to be rigorously addressed before any medical use, just as they are for stents, implants, or other polymeric biomaterials used today.
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