Chemical Engineer Robert Langer has spent the last 14 years developing an ingenious hew drug-smuggling scheme. It's perfectly legal. Langer is not trying to pass drugs across our national border, but across the boundary that shields our bodies from the outside world: the skin. In his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Langer and his coworkers have found that they can slip medicines through skin with pulses of sound. The pulses, emitted by an ultrasound machine, open microscopic pores in the skin so that a liquid drug can leak into the body. Although he's now using a prototype half the size of a shoe box, Langer envisions miniature "sonicators" attached to small drug-soaked patches that people would wear like high-tech Band-Aids.
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