A Novel Technique Enables Quantifying the Molecular Interaction of Solvents with Biological Tissues

The pharmaceutical industry uses various solvents to increase drug penetrability to tissues. The solvent’s choice affects the efficacy of a drug. In this paper, we provide an unprecedented means of relating a solvent to a tissue quantitatively. We show that the solvents induce reorientation of the tissue surface molecules in a way that favors interaction and, therefore, penetrability of a solvent to a tissue. We provide, for the first time, a number for this tendency through a new physical property termed Interfacial Modulus (G(s)). G(s), which so far was only predicted theoretically, is inversely proportional to such interactions. As model systems, we use HeLa and HaCaT tissue cultures with water and with an aqueous DMSO solution. The measurements are done using Centrifugal Adhesion Balance (CAB) when set to effective zero gravity. As expected, the addition of DMSO to water reduces G(s). This reduction in G(s) is usually higher for HaCaT than for HeLa cells, which agrees with the common usage of DMSO in dermal medicine. We also varied the rigidities of the tissues. The tissue rigidity is not expected to relate to G(s), and indeed our results didn’t show a correlation between these two physical properties.