Carbon nanotubes offer a number of exotic options for delivering drugs to cells, Technology Review Physics arXiv Blog reports.

‘To ensure delivery, University of Rochester researchers plan to fill the tubes with a mixture of drugs and water molecules and seal them with a secure cap, illuminating only the cells of interest with an infrared laser. That would heat the tubes and boil the water they contain. The resulting increase in pressure would burst the cap and force the water and drug molecules into the cell, like a grenade bursting.

They have carried out a molecular dynamics simulation to study how such a process might work.

Ref: Vitaly Chaban and Oleg Prezhdo, Water Boiling inside Carbon Nanotubes: Towards Efficient Drug Release, arxiv.org/abs/1202.1328