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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Aug 1.
Published in final edited form as: Adv Drug Deliv Rev. 2016 Mar 2;103:202–217. doi: 10.1016/j.addr.2016.02.008

Figure 4.

Figure 4

A simplified (one directional) illustration of the concept of on-demand drug release by MENPs stimulated by a uniform a.c. magnetic field in X direction. (a) At zero field, only the ionic charge is present in the MEN shell. (b) An additional dipole moment (proportional to the magnetic field) breaks the original symmetry of the charge distribution in the shell. (c) As the field is increased above the threshold value (σionic~σME), the bond on one side is broken. (d,e) The field is reversed to break the bond on the opposite side of the nanoparticle. The red arrows show the electric dipole due to the ME effect. In practice, owing to the random configurations of nanoformulations with respect to the field, the effect is present along every central bond orientation. (Reproduce with author permission, Nair et al, Nature Communication, [49])