An Australian scientist who designed a machine that can 'unboil' an egg, has claimed the approach used in his technology could also help in the fight against cancer.
Professor Colin Raston, who created the method for unravelling tangled proteins in cooked egg whites, has said his method could help to develop medical technologies for a wide range of uses.
The scientist was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2015 for his work into the vortex fluidic device (VFD).
Professor Raston's now famous 'unboiling egg' process is based on the concept of reversing the structural changes to proteins which occur during the heating process.
Egg whites were boiled for 20 minutes at 90°C (194°F), before a urea substance was added to 'chew away' at the whites, liquefying the solid material and breaking down proteins.
However, at this stage the protein 'bits' are still tangled and unusable at this point, so the scientists poured the liquid solution into the VFD.
The machine applies stress to the tiny pieces, forcing them back to their untangled, original form, but it is not known whether the egg is edible after being 'unboiled'.
Now, Professor Raston from Flinders University in Adelaide, has said a similar process can be used to chop tiny tubes of carbon that could ultimately pave the way for more targeted drug therapies.
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been hailed as a source of untapped potential in medicine.
They could be used as the basis for sensors, and as 'vehicles' to accurately deliver drugs to specific sites in the body, such as tumours.
But one of the hurdles holding the technology back has been an inability to reliably produce them to exactly the same length, with the tubes produced in a tangle of different lengths.
Professor Raston has said the VFD could solve both problems at once, precisely chopping them to the desired specification.
Speaking to BBC News, Professor Raston explained: 'When you make CNTs normally, they're entangled - it's like a bowl of spaghetti. They're all stuck together and they're different lengths.'
'What our device does is untangle the carbon nanotubes and then slices them, so you overcome two problems in one go.'
By adding the nanotubes to the machine, along with water and a liquid solvent, the method can reportedly trim the tubes with a laser, reliably producing lengths of around 170 nanometers.
'It's one of highest tensile strength materials, and yet you put it in a liquid, and you spin it in a special way and with a laser you can cut it down,' he told the BBC.
Commenting on last year's Ig Nobel prize, Professor Raston said he had his 'Eureka' moment when he fed a boiled hen egg into the machine and it came back uncooked.
The machine has been hailed as a potential game-changer for the targeted delivery of chemotherapy drugs for cancer treatment.
Professor Raston said: 'It's living the dream.
'All scientists want to do something that is significant, but this has the wow factor.
'It's not what we set out to do, to unboil an egg, but it's the way of explaining the science involved and helping the wider world realise the momentousness of it.'
'The sheer scale of this is mind boggling. The global pharmaceutical industry alone is worth $160 billion annually and the processing of proteins is central to it.
'The VFD is completely changing it – and is set to do the same for the fuel and food industries. It's impossible to place a price on the value of this device.
'Winning an Ig is both humbling and amazing.'
Scientists from Flinders University and the University of California-Irvine worked together on the machine which could drastically cut costs for the pharmaceutical industry.
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