This probably sounds familiar: you’re at your grandmother’s house. You’ve already eaten the salad, the roast, and dessert. You’re completely full, yet she asks if you’d like another helping. After all the love she’s put into cooking, it’s almost impossible to say no. But there’s something in your body that never has this problem: your cells. They know exactly how to say no, and they’re exceptionally good at it.
Cells decide what is allowed to pass through their membrane with remarkable selectivity. Unfortunately, they apply that same ability to many medicines. One of the biggest challenges facing new treatments, such as gene therapy, is that these drugs are often too large, or carry an electrical charge that cells rarely let through. Yet it is precisely inside the cell where they need to act in order to have a therapeutic effect. If the cell says no, the treatment simply cannot work.
But the battle is not lost. In our research group, we are working on a possible solution: boron clusters. These are tiny structures made of just 12 boron atoms and 12 atoms of another chemical element, such as hydrogen, chlorine, bromine, or iodine. Their shape resembles a miniature soccer ball. In fact, if the width of a human hair were scaled up to the size of a football field, these tiny balls would be no larger than an ant. Despite their size, they can act as molecular vehicles, or carriers, helping a wide variety of compounds, their cargo, enter our cells more easily.
For any compound to enter a cell, it first has to reach the cell’s front door: the plasma membrane. But before it can even get that far, it faces another barrier: water molecules. Surprisingly, water is one of the main reasons why many compounds struggle to reach the membrane. Water molecules surround them in a highly ordered network that acts like a “force field”. This is where boron clusters come into play. They bind to the compound, the cargo, and, thanks to a rare property known as superchaotropicity, they disrupt the ordered network of water molecules surrounding it. The “force field” weakens, allowing both the carrier and its cargo to cross this barrier together and reach the cell membrane.
At the moment, these clusters are not yet capable of delivering something as complex as the genetic material used in gene therapy. We are still in the early stages of fundamental research, but every step teaches us more about why cells say no—and how we might persuade them to say yes. Perhaps one day these tiny carriers will even become part of a vaccine. Until then, your cells will continue to make things difficult. They are still much better at saying “no” than you and I. But thanks to science, that “no” is becoming just a little bit easier to overcome.
Researcher and science communicator. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Biology from the University of Santiago de Compostela, as well as a Master's degree in Chemistry from the same institution and a Master's degree in Science Communication from the International
University of Valencia (VIU).
He has experience in science communication management, collaborating with initiatives such as Pint of Science and other science outreach organizations, while also creating science-related content for social media.
He is currently researching the development of boron clusters as molecular carriers to transport compounds into cells.