You’ve seen the tanks and the trucks delivering them: cylinders of nitric oxide (NO), each one 64 pounds, highly pressurized and more than four feet tall.

NO gas is required for anesthesia, sedation and a range of healthcare applications, including treating cardiopulmonary disease (the gas widens blood vessels in the lungs).

“But what if there was a way to generate the same quality and same amount of NO from a very small chemical reaction, without the need for a tank?” asks Xuewei Wang, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry of the College of Humanities and Sciences. “It would be a huge value.”

His lab wants to generate inhaled NO in a cost-effective, compact and safe fashion. He and the team discovered that certain organic compounds, which offer their chemical properties as “donors” to create NO, are highly soluble and stable when mixed with a solvent. When Wang hits the donor and solvent with an LED light, the donors start releasing NO. They’re now fine-tuning the release of the gas.

“You cannot just randomly generate NO. If you have too much, it could be toxic. Too little, it’s not effective. You must control the levels of NO very precisely and stably,” he says. “We have been focusing on formulations of nitric oxide donors, and we have developed some unique formulations to make NO release from the donor very stably. We are the only ones who can make NO sustainably compared to the much larger NO generators on the market.”

He’s using his NO knowledge in other ways, too.

This year, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, awarded a $1.52 million grant to Wang and his team for their NO solution to help prevent infectious and thrombotic complications for patients receiving chemotherapy, dialysis and other treatments through their veins via central venous catheters. The team’s lock solution is a liquid that fills the catheter when not in use to prevent clotting. It delivers a controlled release of NO, which Wang says “serves as a natural anti-platelet and antimicrobial agent in the human body.”

Wang, who studies drug delivery, medical implants’ use alongside NO and the development of chemical sensors for health monitoring and diagnosis, has also received grants from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (also part of NIH), the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation, the VCU C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research, the VCU Commercialization Fund and industry for this research. He is working with VCU TechTransfer and Ventures on patent protection for formulations and sensors that his team is developing.