Laura Gibson's research samples are as brightly colored as jewels—and it's just possible they may have a bright future in health care.

"This is a polysaccharide gel I made yesterday," says Gibson, a chemistry major, as she eases a translucent red pellet out of a makeshift vial. The pellet, about as big around as a crayon, feels something like Jell-O and something like hard-boiled egg white.

Like Jell-O and egg white, this gel is edible, being made mostly of carrageenan (a seaweed derivative used in ice cream) and pectin (the substance that makes jelly jell). The gel is a carrier—a matrix. The red color comes from dye molecules entrapped within it like fruit in a Jell-O mold, as Gibson says. When the gel is placed in water, the dye molecules will slowly diffuse out of it.

Polysaccharides are carbohydrates—starches, sugars, cellulose. But Gibson's gels, despite their ingredients, have nothing to do with nutrition. She hopes they might someday be made into tiny implants for safe, slow-release delivery of drugs directly to diseased tissue.

Polysaccharides gel in the presence of certain types of salt solutions. For example, carrageenan gels when mixed with potassium chloride; pectin gels when mixed with calcium chloride. The reaction "creates a structure sort of like a double Slinky," says Gibson, "and you can put drug molecules inside."

As a sophomore, Gibson won an undergraduate assistantship to do research in the lab of chemistry professor Bakul Dave. A postdoctoral fellow in Dave's lab showed Gibson how to make a gel out of carrageenan, and asked her to explore the possibilities of such gels for drug delivery.

Other research labs have studied the release of molecules from carrageenan. But Dave, who is a materials scientist, wants to go a step farther: tailoring polysaccharide gels to control the release rate of molecules. "Can we selectively tune it?" he says. If so, these gels might have great potential for medical uses.

Gibson ticks off some of the advantages that polysaccharide gels would offer for drug implants: they're nontoxic, inexpensive, and can be metabolized. They would dissolve harmlessly in the body rather than having to be removed after treatment.

As a proxy for drug molecules, Gibson is currently using dye molecules, since their release is easier to monitor. She also uses an instrument called a UV-visible spectrophotometer to determine the rate at which the dye molecules are released when the gel is placed in water.

The trick for medical applications will be to produce a stable, firm gel that can release drug molecules in a controllable way, preferably over days or weeks. Specific drugs might require the formulation of specific types of polysaccharide gels. For example, since drug molecules would have to fit into the gels' Slinky-like cages, their size could affect the choice of polysaccharide.

Then there's the matter of electrostatic charge. "Polysaccharides will react differently with different drugs depending on the charge of the drug," Gibson says. That affects the drug release rate. Positively charged molecules carried in a negatively charged gel will release more reluctantly—hence more slowly—than negatively charged molecules will, and vice versa.

Carrageenan and pectin have a negative charge; Gibson is now beginning to work with positively charged gels as well. The ultimate goal, Dave says, is to make gels with varying proportions of negatively and positively charged components. The idea is to control the release rate of a particular drug by controlling the overall charge of the gel.

Changing the acidity or alkalinity of the water also can change the release rate, so the gels will eventually need to be tested in fluids chemically similar to body fluids.

Dave and Gibson are most interested in the idea of using drug-laden gels to treat eye infections, particularly serious infections that can result in blindness.

Many eye infections, Gibson explains, require frequent treatment with eye drops, which "don't do their job very well." Very little of the drug—"maybe only 5 percent," she says—reaches the infected cells that are its target. And in the case of deep-tissue infections, eye drops don't penetrate deeply enough, meaning that drugs must be administered by injection.

If researchers can make the gels in the form of tiny implantable beads that would release the needed drug slowly, over the course of a week or a month, serious infections could be treated with less pain and fewer doctor visits for the patient. The gel implant would be delivered via a needle, with the advantage that fewer injections would be needed. Or, less invasively, it might be inserted into the corner of the eye, where it could float in tear duct fluid and release the drug over a period of time.

Gibson hopes to continue working on this project for the rest of her undergraduate career. "It's been a good first experience with research, and I think it's an experience that probably most people don't have until their second semester of grad school," she says of her assistantship.

"Lab exercises in textbooks are very cut-and-dried, like a recipe. Research isn't like that. You have to figure out the path on your own. And it might be the wrong path—you may make mistakes—but you learn something from it, and that's what's important."

Gibson's father is a civil engineer, and she grew up watching "Bill Nye the Science Guy" and "Newton's Apple." She "always loved science," she says, and found her niche with a chemistry class in high school.

"[Chemistry] gives me a greater appreciation for the world around me," she says. "The universe is so complicated, when you start looking at little pieces of it, but it's so elegant—it works so well together."

Gibson has a little bit of theater in her blood too. "Talking plus chemistry equals a good time for me," she admits. As a result, she has done several science lab demonstrations for television news broadcasts on KFVS-12 in Cape Girardeau, Mo. "I'm kind of a regular over there now," she says.

Her aim is to get her doctorate in chemistry and perhaps become a professor, but she wouldn't altogether mind being the next generation's Bill Nye. "Especially for girls," she says. "You don't see a lot of women in science.

"Maybe some girl will be watching channel 12 and say, that Laura Gibson is in science and she's having a good time, and that's cool. Who knows?"